Elegy

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “Elegy” by Charles Beaumont, published in Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy in 1953.

Gutenberg Link

Elegy

SPOILERS BELOW

“Elegy” sees a spaceship, damaged in war and now adrift in space with only a few surviving crew members, spot an asteroid which impossibly has an Earth city on it. Landing to investigate, they discover it is a cemetery, where bodies are permanently preserved amidst idyllic surroundings. The asteroid’s caretaker then poisons them and adds them to the collection.

I’m pretty sure this story was adapted as an episode of The Twilight Zone. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now. It’s just too pointlessly bleak for my tastes.

Final Rating: 1/5

The Hills of Estrella Roja

Saturn turns the day to devil light, a meliorating, monstrous satellite. Shaded, we can speak in scimitars, miter adder cuspids into darts. Let’s venture into The Hills of Estrella Roja, by Ashley Robin Franklin.

Synopsis:

In this delightfully creepy and unapologetically queer horror romp of a graphic novel, sometimes dreams do come true. Nightmares are technically dreams, after all….

When college freshman Kat Fields receives a mysterious email urging her to visit a relatively unknown Texas town with a history of witchcraft, strange sightings, and “devil lights”—glowing red stars that appear above the town’s hills every night—she ditches her plans for spring break and takes a solo road trip to Estrella Roja to investigate for her podcast, Paranormal Texas, catchphrase: “Y’all stay spooky!”

Meanwhile, Marisol “Mari” Castillo, is also headed for Estrella Roja to attend the funeral for her abuela whom she hasn’t seen since childhood, when her mom cut ties with the family and left town. Feeling lost and bored, she decides to help Kat after a chance meeting at the local diner—and, okay, it doesn’t hurt that Kat is super cute.

As the two girls grow closer not only to each other, but to uncovering the dark legacy that the town was built on, they discover that something hungry lurks beneath the strange stars and that in the hills of Estrella Roja, some secrets should stay buried.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

The Hills of Estrella Roja is about two girls, Kat and Marisol. Kat runs a podcast where she talks about the paranormal, and is headed to the remote town of Estrella Roja to investigate the mysterious red “devil lights” that appear over hills at night and don’t show up on photographs. Mari is also headed to Estrella Roja, to attend the funeral of her grandmother. The two of them meet and decide to team up to investigate the town’s secrets. In the process, they nearly unleash a horde of demons; but luckily, it turns out Mari’s family are witches called Lechuza who can bind the demons back to their pit. Also, Kat and Mari end up as girlfriends, so that works out well.

This book had some things to recommend it. I liked the chemistry between Kat and Mari, and the progress of their investigation into the town’s mysteries. I also liked the reveal at the end of Mari’s often-overlooked sister Ana’s role in events. On the other hand, though, the plot was kind of frustrating in that it was based entirely on Mari’s family giving vague, ominous warnings about the land around the pit without explaining the reason, which naturally only fueled the girls’ curiosity (all of them: Mari, Kat, and even Ana it turns out). Now, them wanting to keep Kat out of the loop, I can understand, as they’re worried she’s an outsider come to dig up their secrets; but Mari is part of the family – this is stuff she really needs to know. And yes, the story gives her mother and cousin Isabel specific reasons why they don’t talk with Mari; what about all the others? Particularly after the first time they spotted Mari poking around the pit – that should’ve been a big clue that their strategy of cryptic bullshit wasn’t working and they needed to tell her about the demons before she, you know, was tricked into letting them out.

Also a pet peeve of mine: all of the video evidence Kat takes of the supernatural stuff gets destroyed, thus leaving her with no proof. The thing is, that isn’t even necessary in this case, because after learning everything, Kat decides she won’t do a podcast episode on Estrella Roja in order to respect Mari’s family’s privacy. That decision would feel a lot more meaningful if Kat actually had evidence which she then chose not to use; but no, all the evidence of the supernatural she gathered has to be ruined, because that is a cliche of the genre and it must be adhered to regardless of whether it makes sense in the context of the story being told.

Well, The Hills of Estrella Roja wasn’t bad. The characters were all very good, and I did enjoy reading it. It just could have been a lot better if not for those few frustrating flaws.

Final Rating: 3/5

Traumrei

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “Traumrei” by Charles Beaumont, published in Infinity Science Fiction in 1956.

Gutenberg Link

Traumrei

SPOILERS BELOW

“Traumrei” is about a death row inmate who claims that he’s dreaming ad everyone is part of his dream; if they execute him, he’ll wake up and they’ll die. Sounds like a solipsist delusion to me; but this being bad speculative fiction, he is of course correct.

As always, “and it was all just a dream” proves to be a terrible ending. The Wizard of Oz movie pulled it off once, and then it was never done successfully ever again; but that doesn’t stop people from trying. I’m not saying you can’t do something with a dream world that ends when the dreamer awakens – there’s a whole portion of Trixie Slaughteraxe for President that does something similar with the universe created by the Scepter of Death – but the difference there is that it’s part of an ongoing narrative, with the Scepter having been established prior and what happens during that part affecting the plot afterwards. It’s not just a single, inconsequential, self-contained dream. I have dreams of my own every night; I don’t need to waste my time reading about made up ones.

Final Rating: 1/5

The Demon of the Stupa

Dragged ya down below down to the devil’s show to be his guest forever. Peace of mind is less than never. Hate to twist your mind, but God ain’t on your side. An old acquaintance severed. Burn the world your last endeavor. Let’s steal a soul with The Demon of the Stupa, by Natsuki Osonoe.

Synopsis:

The Demon who commits endless acts of tyranny, Takeomi the Fallen. Shotaro Murata, the Ronin who set out to subjugate him was actually Takeomi’s son. Along his journey, an unknown vengeful spirit appears before Shotaro, insisting that its help is essential to defeat the Fallen, but…?

Source: Anime Planet

SPOILERS BELOW

The Demon of the Stupa is about Shotaro Murata, the son of the samurai Takeomi the Fallen. Once a great hero, Takeomi made a deal with evil spirits for power, resulting in them eventually corrupting him and taking him over. Now that he’s become a monster, Shotaro is on a quest to slay him. Shotaro encounters an amalgamation of evil spirits which offers a pact with him for similar power, in order to be able to fight Takeomi on equal footing; but Shotaro is determined not to repeat his father’s mistakes and rejects the deal, instead managing to defeat him as a human.

This was a fairly decent one-shot. The highlight was of course the fight between Shotaro and Takeomi, which was very well executed. That said, the attempts at comedy, like Shotaro repeatedly ineffectually slashing the vengeful spirit as it followed him around pestering him to make a deal with it, didn’t really do much for me. Ultimately, it just boiled down to one big action scene: fine, but not really particularly memorable.

The Demon of the Stupa is an alright one-shot.

Final Rating: 3/5

Pillar of Fire

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “Pillar of Fire” by Ray Bradbury, published in Planet Stories in 1948.

Gutenberg Link

Pillar of Fire

SPOILERS BELOW

“Pillar of Fire” is about William Lantry, who crawls out of his grave 400 years after being buried. In an age when all corpses are cremated, he is the last vampire. Lantry proceeds to murder a whole bunch of people out of sheer spite towards the living. What a charming protagonist. He eventually gets caught and incinerated, but not soon enough for my tastes.

This was just a very unpleasant story, with our supposed protagonist running around committing wanton mass murder for no particular purpose. It wasn’t even like there was an even semi-sympathetic goal he was working towards; he just woke up and chose senseless violence. As such, I was completely uninvested in the characters and uninterested in the story. Just a complete failure.

Final Rating: 1/5

Specter Inspectors

When you feel my heat, look into my eyes. It’s where my demons hide, it’s where my demons hide. Don’t get too close, it’s dark inside. It’s where my demons hide, it’s where my demons hide. Let’s ghostbust Specter Inspectors, by Bowen McCurdy and Kaitlyn Musto.

Synopsis:

True believer Noa, her cynical little sibling Gus, credulous camera man Ko, and sceptical Astrid head to one of the most haunted towns in America to prove that ghosts exist, for all the social media likes!

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE… ON SOCIAL MEDIA!

True believer Noa, her cynical little sibling Gus, credulous cameraman Ko, and sceptical Astrid head to one of the most haunted towns in America to prove that ghosts exist, for all the social media likes!

The investigations of hauntings uncover something more devilish than just a couple of ghosts, something that will put Noa and Astrid’s relationship to the test… and reveal the centuries-old sinister secrets of the town itself.

Bowen McCurdy (The Long Way Home) & rising star Kaitlyn Musto introduce the Spector Inspectors, everyone’s favourite new internet sensations who live that Scooby Doo life chasin’ ghosts!

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

Specter Inspectors is about the “InSPOOKters”, a group of four ghost hunters producing a show where they search for the supernatural. The latest episode brings them to Cape Grace, a town with a reputation for spooky happenings: eerie apparitions, mysterious disappearances, and so on. While investigating, one of them gets possessed by a demon. To save her, they need to uncover the hidden secrets of the town’s history – and they need to hurry, before they’re caught by members of a secret order which is determined to exorcize the demon by force, and doesn’t care if the host survives the process.

This was a great comic. The cast were all fun characters with great interactions – and I’m including the demon in that. The plot was solid, with a good mix of mystery elements and action scenes. The climax in particular was excellent, with the villain taking on an impressively nasty monstrous form and the heroes thinking outside the box to defeat him in a clever fashion. The art was pleasant to look at, too, making for an overall very pleasant reading experience. I definitely enjoyed this one a lot.

Specter Inspectors #1-5 are collected in Specter Inspectors.

Final Rating: 4/5

Jonah of the Jove-Run

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “Jonah of the Jove-Run” by Ray Bradbury, published in Planet Stories in 1948.

Gutenberg Link

Jonah of the Jove-Run

SPOILERS BELOW

“Jonah of the Jove-Run” is about Nibley, an old drunk with a talent for mentally calculating the orbital trajectories of celestial bodies. When a ship preparing to transport vital supplies from Mars through the asteroid belt to Jupiter has its asteroid computator fail to arrive as scheduled, Nibley offers his talents in the computator’s place. He nearly blows it by getting drunk at the first opportunity; but when a saboteur strikes, he seizes the opportunity to redeem himself. Though mortally wounded, he’s able to plot a safe course for the ship before dying.

This was a decent story of a screw-up redeeming himself in the end. I think it went a bit too far in making Nibley’s abilities quasi-magical – I could suspend my disbelief as long as it was limited to calculating trajectories, but the secret message he passes the saboteur at the end was just too much – but on the whole, I found it to be an enjoyable read.

Final Rating: 3/5

Sawkill Girls

See my teardrops falling down. My wife left this sawmill town. She said sawmill life had been a sin. The gravy were too thin. Let’s saw into Sawkill Girls, by Claire Legrand.

Synopsis:

Beware of the woods and the dark, dank deep. He’ll follow you home, and he won’t let you sleep.

Who are the Sawkill Girls?

Marion: the new girl. Awkward and plain, steady and dependable. Weighed down by tragedy and hungry for love she’s sure she’ll never find.

Zoey: the pariah. Luckless and lonely, hurting but hiding it. Aching with grief and dreaming of vanished girls. Maybe she’s broken—or maybe everyone else is.

Val: the queen bee. Gorgeous and privileged, ruthless and regal. Words like silk and eyes like knives, a heart made of secrets and a mouth full of lies.

Their stories come together on the island of Sawkill Rock, where gleaming horses graze in rolling pastures and cold waves crash against black cliffs. Where kids whisper the legend of an insidious monster at parties and around campfires.

Where girls have been disappearing for decades, stolen away by a ravenous evil no one has dared to fight… until now.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

Sawkill Girls is about three girls living on the island of Sawkill Rock. Marion has just moved there along with her mother and sister after the death of her father, only for her sister to become the latest victim in a long string of disappearances of young women. Zoey has been researching the disappearances ever since her childhood friend Thora became one of the victims. And Val is from a family bound in servitude to the dark being responsible for the disappearances: an eldritch horror from another dimension that has grown stronger with each killing and will soon break free to terrorize the world. Sawkill Rock has chosen these three girls as its champions, imbuing them with supernatural powers so that they defeat the monster before its too late.

This book had some good ideas, but I didn’t really enjoy reading it. For some reason, it felt too dark, too sad, too grim for me; which I found surprising, given that when you look at the events of the plot from an objective perspective, it doesn’t seem that bad at all: the three main characters all survive and are victorious, and only two non-villain characters are horribly murdered between the start of the book and the end. That’s a practically negligible kill count compared to other books I’ve enjoyed, so why did it feel so bad to read? After thinking about, I finally put my finger on the reason: the characters are too likeable. You see, while I’ve always rolled my eyes at the type of stock idiot teen character who populates so many horror stories, reading this made me realize that such characterization actually serves a valuable purpose: you don’t feel too bad when they die, because they were kind of annoying jerks who somewhat had it coming. The victims in Sawkill Girls, on the other hand, were too well developed, making their deaths hurt too much. Hell, Thora was dead before the book even started and just Zoey’s flashbacks to her were enough to make me feel her death more keenly than certain characters from other series who got multiple books worth of page time. Which I guess is a sign of good writing on a purely technical level, but one that’s harmful to my actual enjoyment of the book. And that’s what these reviews ultimately measure – not how much abstract “quality” a book possesses on some perfectly impartial universal scale, but how much pleasure I got out of reading them. And while, again, Sawkill Girls did definitely have good parts, the depths of my emotional attachment to the characters who died proved such a downer that I came away with an overall negative feeling.

Ultimately, Sawkill Girls just isn’t the type of book I enjoy.

Final Rating: 2/5

Zero Hour

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “Zero Hour” by Ray Bradbury, published in Planet Stories in 1947.

Gutenberg Link

Zero Hour

SPOILERS BELOW

“Zero Hour” sees aliens invade Earth by convincing children to help them, framing it as a game called Invasion. Though adults all over the world see their children exhibiting bizarre behavior, and any child asked freely explains the whole plot, they still just dismiss it as youthful imagination until it’s too late.

So, with a few well-written exceptions, I dislike child characters. This is not one of the exceptions. The adults are no better, all being infuriatingly obtuse. Add to that a non-ending that just cuts off once the invasion begins, and there was nothing about this story to amuse me.

Final Rating: 1/5

Side Effects

My mood is down and my tongue’s getting rough. It must be side effects. I’m taking pills and I drink like a lush. It must be side effects Yeah, I’m afraid of my shadow, what’s going on? Can’t get nothing done, who knew? Let’s pay the price for what we put in our veins with Side Effects, by Ted Anderson and Tara O’Connor.

Synopsis:

It’s Hannah’s first year away at college – the first time she’s been away from home, without a support network. Within the first month, the combination of classes and socializing and adjusting to college life sends her into a full-on breakdown. Fortunately, her roommate finds her, Hannah goes to campus mental health, and they prescribe her therapy and meds ― though with every new medication, you’ve got to watch out for unexpected side effects.

Every new medication Hannah tries comes with a new power and side effect. One makes her super-tough, and also makes her gain thirty pounds. Another gives her telepathy, while also completely screwing up her sleep schedule. Yet another gives her super-strength, as well as terrible constipation.

Nothing balances, but the powers are handy; Hannah even manages to save a few of her friends from mortal peril, or at least minor annoyances. And with the growing confidence from her powers and her therapy, Hannah even manages to ask out the cute girl she’s been eyeing!

Hannah doesn’t want to be a hero – she just wants to be well. But what does “well” even look like? What does it mean to be “healthy,” mentally speaking? How do you fix your brain when you’re living inside it? And can you really help other people if you can’t even help yourself?

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

Side Effects is the story of Hannah, a college freshman struggling with anxiety and depression. She gets prescribed medications, which in additional to the usual unpleasant side-effects also give her superpowers. The story is about Hannah struggling to adjust to the medications while pursuing a romance with a fellow student, Iz.

This was a decent story, if a bit odd in execution. Take the superpowers, for instance: they didn’t really factor into the plot of the story, in that there was no explanation for why Hannah got them and she didn’t use them to become a superhero or anything, so they functioned as more of a metaphor for medication side effects than anything – except Hannah also had regular side effects, so you get the sense the superpower aspect could have been cut entirely without affecting the story too much. Feels like bit of a wasted opportunity, to introduce this element and then do almost nothing with it. There was also a bit of storytelling clash between what was being told and what was being shown – when on the medication that caused disassociation and astral projection, Hannah was repeatedly shown to be zoning out and falling asleep during class, so I was a little surprised when the story then reported that her grades were greatly improved since she started taking it: that certainly isn’t the impression I was getting from what was shown on-panel.

Well, the character work was good: Hannah’s anxiety over managing her medication and attempts at romance with Iz were both handled well. As such, I think I can call this graphic novel fine overall. I just wish it had made more use of its premise.

Final Rating: 3/5