Emo Nemo

Mily

Yourneighbor

Sarah

Shaidrian Rios

Jimmy Beans

miCCwatreSSop

Julie Wynne - videos

Kapuster

Nicky Tallon

Harini Sen

Vastralaya

Jack Torrance's new job at the Overlook Hotel is the perfect chance for a fresh start. As the off-season caretaker at the atmospheric old hotel, he'll have plenty of time to spend reconnecting with his family and working on his writing. But as the harsh winter weather sets in, the idyllic location feels ever more remote...and more sinister. And the only one to notice the strange and terrible forces gathering around the Overlook is Danny Torrance, a uniquely gifted five-year-old.

After a nuclear World War III has destroyed most of the globe, the few remaining survivors in southern Australia await the radioactive cloud that is heading their way and bringing certain death to everyone in its path. Among them is an American submarine captain struggling to resist the knowledge that his wife and children in the United States must be dead. Then a faint Morse code signal is picked up, transmitting from somewhere near Seattle, and Captain Towers must lead his submarine crew on a bleak tour of the ruined world in a desperate search for signs of life. On the Beach is a remarkably convincing portrait of how ordinary people might face the most unimaginable nightmare.

”In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, fallsdrop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, come wisdomthrough the awful grace of God. --AeschylusI get a wild hair every so often and recently I decided that I needed to go on a 1970s blockbuster horror novel extravaganza tour. It all started with shifted some books around and finding this ratty well loved copy of The Exorcist that inexplicably found its way into my book collection. I’d swear it was stolen from one of Kemper’s now famous Rubbermaid container boxes of nostalgic paperbacks, but I gave my midget ninjas specific instructions NOT to take anything from Kemper’s abode, but simply take a look around, so the presence of this book on my shelves is still a mystery.\
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The Mysterious copy of The Exorcist.When I was in middle school I rode the bus to school and every day this teenager with rumpled hair and scuffed motorcycle boots would catch a ride with us. He had been clocked for speeding by the cops and had led them on a merry chase around the countryside until he turned a corner too quickly, hit gravel, and rolled his car. He was a LEGEND. Needless to say he lost his driving privileges for a long, long time. He would always sit in the front and there was always this sweet scent coming off his clothes that later when I went to college and attended my first party I had that ah ha moment. He’d lean back against the window and hoist those boots out in the aisle where we could all admire them. He always had a paperback novel with him, usually of the horror genre, and he would studiously ignore us and read his book. We of course were boring holes through him with fevered eyes because he was the most fascinating thing we’d ever seen. One day he looked back down the bus at us and said, “You want me to read you some of this?” as he flopped the latest paperback in the air. It was called The Exorcist. I don’t know if he understood or even understands today how cool a gesture that was, but it was pretty damn cool. So he started reading to us. We never got the whole story just bits here and there. Sometimes he would disappear for a while usually because he was jammed up in a little more trouble than normal. He’d show up with different paperbacks, The Omen, Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby, The Other, and The Amityville Horror to name a few. We were enraptured.He scared the crap out of us. The ghastly images those books inspired in my mind kept my eyes wide open late into the late which might have something to do with why my mom wouldn’t let me read such books.Those moments on the bus with him reading to us and scaring us are some of my most fond childhood memories. Boy, did we feel like we were getting away with something. So I started reading my ratty, not Kemper’s copy, of The Exorcist and could not believe how much I was struggling with the writing. The dialogue was horrible. How could this guy sell millions of copies of this book? I did some research. It seems that William Peter Blatty finished writing the rough draft of this book and was offered a lucrative screenwriting job and never polished the book. An editor, obviously not someone in the same category as Maxwell Perkins, allowed the book to go to print as basically a rough draft. Decades later Blatty is asked to read the book for the audio version. He kept having to stop to ask “who wrote this crap?” This story does have a happy ending. Blatty went back through and polished and rewrote and even added a critical scene to the book. It was released in time for the fortieth anniversary edition. \
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William Peter Blatty looking like he is ready for his casting call for a spaghetti western.The Dodge City Public library, they never has anything I absolutely need immediately, had a copy of the fortieth anniversary edition. Hallelujah! Praise the book gods! The difference between the books is a two star rating which I was already worried about how I was going to explain that rating to the legions of fans out there, and a four star rating which is much easier and much more fun to write a review for. So if you have thoughts of reading this book make sure you read the fortieth anniversary edition because as Blatty stated. ”This is the version I would like to be remembered for.”This is a novel about a demon possession of a twelve year old girl, but Blatty also spends a good amount of time explaining the other psychological aspects that could be causing the symptoms other than a demonic possession. The priest Damien Karras, who also happens to be a psychologist, finds himself confronting not only an evil entity beyond his wildest imaginations, but also his personal struggles with his own faith. He is damaged, dark, and brooding...a magnet for women if he were interested. \
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Jason Miller is Damien Karras in the movie.”As he lifted the Host in consecration, it trembled in his fingers with a hope that he dared not hope, that he fought with every particle and fiber of his will. “‘For this--is--My body.’” he intoned with a whispered intensity.No, it’s bread! It’s nothing but bread!He dared not love again and lose. That loss was too great, that pain too keen. The cause of his skepticism and his doubts, his attempts to eliminate natural causes in the case of Regan’s seeming possession, was the fiery intensity of his yearning to be able to believe. He bowed his head and placed the consecrated Host in his mouth, where in a moment it would stick in the dryness of his throat. And of his faith.”The thought that kept going through my head as I read this book is if you find proof of the devil or a demon or even true evil doesn't that mean you’ve found proof of God? \
  Glory be to God for dappled things,For skies of couple-color as a brindled cow;For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;Fresh-fire-coal chestnut falls; finches’ wings...He fathers forth whose beauty is past change.Praise him.\
Regan or Rags as her mother likes to call her starts exhibiting strange behavior, talking in tongues, and levitating. It is never really explained how or why she becomes possessed. Unless I somehow missed that part. Changing editions midstream has me a little worried about that as I did not go back and read the hundred or so pages that I’d read before the switch. She goes from being a creative, likable, normal twelve year old girl into something that is not only horrifying, but barely recognizable as human. \
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Linda Blair played Regan in the famous movie version.”Reining in his revulsion, he closed the door and then his eyes locked, stunned, on the thing that was Regan, on the creature that was lying on its back on the bed, head propped against a pillow while eyes bulged wide in their hollow sockets shone with mad cunning and burning intelligence, with interest and with spite, as they fixed upon his; as they watched him intently, seething in a face shaped into a skeletal mask of unthinkable malevolence. Karras shifted his gaze to the tangled and thickly matted hair; to the wasted arms and legs and distended stomach jutting up so grotesquely; then back to the eyes: they were watching him...pinning him...”\
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Transformed!!!Terrifying stuff!”Requested and performed exorcisms had begun to decline in the Western world by the 18th century due to advancements in medical understanding, and occurred rarely until the latter half of the 20th century when the public saw a sharp rise due to the media attention exorcisms were getting. There was “a 50% increase in the number of exorcisms performed between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s”.Media suggested hysteria. \
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Iconic shot from the movie.The church has a priest who had performed the last exorcism in 1949. He is an elderly Jesuit priest named Lankester Merrin. The two priests know they are over their heads, but in a true act of courage and faith take on the demon. No need for more details as I’m sure most of you have seen the movie and if you have not I would encourage you to read the book before watching the movie. The movie was nominated for ten academy awards and grossed over $441 million worldwide. No wonder the demand for priests and their knowledge of exorcisms went up exponentially. The tour of 1970s horror will continue with Jaws. Stay tuned. ADDENDUMMy friend, Gary Wyatt, supplied me with a picture of the house where the famous exorcism case happened in 1949. This was the case that inspired William Peter Blatty to write this book. Instead of a girl this case involved a thirteen year old boy named Roland Doe. Walter Halloran a Catholic priest of the Society of Jesus performed the exorcism. The setting: St. Louis, Missouri. \
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Exorcism House in St. LouisIf you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

”The dumpkeeper had spawned nine daughters and named them out of an old medical dictionary gleaned from the rubbish he picked. Uretha, Cerebella, Hernia Sue.They moved like cats and like cats in heat attracted surrounding swains to their midden until the old man used to go out at night and fire a shotgun at random just to clear the air. He couldn’t tell which was the oldest or what age and he didn’t know whether they should go out with boys or not. Like cats they sensed his lack of resolution. They were coming and going all hours in all manner of degenerate cars, a dissolute carousel of rotting sedans and ni**erized convertibles with bluedot taillamps and chrome horns and foxtails and giant dice or dashboard demons of spurious fur. All patched up out of parts and lowslung and bumping over the ruts. Filled with old lanky country boys with long cocks and big feet.”\
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You could say that those country boys and those daughters of the dumpkeeper are uneducated, disenfranchised, white trash, but don’t put them too far down the rungs of the evolutionary ladder because you still need room for Lester. If you were to compose a ballad of Lester Ballard it would not be one of heroism, of self-sacrifice, or of kindness. It would be a song of the grotesque, of darkness, and of the human mind degraded to the point of madness. If Lester were an animal. He would be a dog with rabies. You’d put him down because he wouldn’t be safe walking around with normal people. The sheriff, after yet another issue with Lester, gives him a warning that, of course, didn’t make even the slightest impression on Lester. ”Mr. Ballard, he said. You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in.”What the sheriff should have done, if he’d had any inkling of what was to come, was to gunnysack Lester, and throw him in a deep river. He could have tried driving him across the state line and leaving him to be someone else’s problem, but Lester is just that kind of bad penny that always turns up again. \
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2013 movie poster for Child of GodIt all begins when Lester’s ancestral home is put up on the auction blocks. Now it ain’t much. There is maybe some good timber on it, and getting bids is not easy, but land will always sell. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t really say, but usually when land gets sold at auction there is a back tax issue. Lester doesn’t seem like the type that would ever think paying taxes was in his best interest. What this does is make Lester into a wandering bundle of mischief. He steals. He spies. He plots vengeance. Not that anyone in the county seems to have any prospects to achieve prosperity (anything above the poverty line), but Lester falls into that category of negative digits. His attempts at wooing women, let me see your titties, are met with disdain and rejection. Even the dumpkeeper’s daughters, who will hump just about anything, would crush him under the heel of a calloused foot rather than give him a whiff of the pleasure of feminine kindness. Lester is an annoyance, but comical, inspiring the shaking of matronly heads, and laughs between men over a bottle of shine. If truth be known they think he is a troubled, but relatively harmless dumbass. It’s not like he’d have ever thought of it on his own. It just fell into his lap. He comes across a jalopy running in the woods with the radio on. A boy and a girl with clothing disarrayed are in the backseat dead. The girl...well...she is still warm and unlike other girls she ain’t saying no. Yeah he did it. Lester had such a good time he brought her back to an abandoned house he’d been using for shelter. He’d been lonely of course.”Alone in the empty shell of a house the squatter watched through the moteblown glass a rimshard of bonecolored moon come cradling up over the black balsams on the ridge, ink trees a facile hand had sketched against the paler dark of winter heavens.”Well the girl wasn’t much for conversation, but if he brought her close to the fire and warmed her up she could almost feel alive. ”He took off all her clothes and looked at her, inspecting her body carefully, as if he would see how she was made. He went outside and looked in through the window at her lying naked before the fire. When he came back in he unbuckled his trousers and stepped out of them and laid next to her. He pulled the blanket over them.”Just as Lester is settling into his new domestic arrangement tragedy strikes. He builds the fire too big and the whole house catches on fire. He saves his beloved rifle, the bears he won at the carnaval, and his bedding, but his new plaything, kept in the attic so she would refreeze, was lost. Except for the fickleness of fate Lester might have remained a happily contented necrophiliac for the rest of the winter. Now summer would have brought on different issues. The smell of decay might have even put a damper on Lester’s lustful stirrings. Homeless and womanless Lester decides to try and fix both those problems. As women disappear and the law is powerless, for lack of evidence, to do anything about Lester’s predilections, the White Caps decide to take matters into their own hands. In Indiana back in 1873 farmers started forming this secret society that would violently inflict justice on people who seemed to be beyond the law. As this movement spread South the organization took on some racial overtones and started disguising themselves similarly to the KKK. Merchants who were buying up too much land and black men who had thoughts of becoming land owners were targeted in a time when poor white farmers felt they were losing everything. They were farmers not law enforcement officers. Lester escapes. ”He’d long been wearing the underclothes of his female victims but now he took to appearing in their outerwear as well. A gothic doll in illfit clothes, its carmine mouth floating detached and bright in the white landscape.”Lester starts out being strange, just a bit different. Not different in an Einstein pondering the universe kind of way. More like two brain cells drifting around in his head that collide once in a while creating a spark kind of guy. Once he has been banished from any center hold in the community he becomes feral, a man caught in a permanent state of flight or fight. He becomes dangerous and unhinged. The grotesque becomes as normal to him as white picket fences are to the rest of us. \
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Cormac McCarthyCormac McCarthy will always expose you to a form of human being that will make you uncomfortable. You will twitch in your seat. You will check the doors and windows one more time before going to bed. You will start to make a more indepth analysis of your crazy cousin Larry. You will reluctantly come away with a broader understanding of the spectrum of people making up humanity. You will question your own sanity and wonder if it is possible for you to ever be as crazy as Lester Ballard. Would Lester have been able to stay a hair’s breadth away from insanity if he’d had one normal friend? Just one person who could give him a bead to follow. A person who could say ‘that ain’t right Lester’ at a critical moment. I do ponder questions like that late at night when I wonder if I could be stable enough and patient enough to keep someone else sane. I would probably be too practical to put myself in the path of a psychopath. We just hope the madness doesn’t find us. I also have read and reviewed Suttree by Cormac McCarthyIf you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

Clive Barker is widely acknowledged as the master of nerve-shattering horror. The Hellbound Heart is one of his best, one of the most dead-frightening stories you are likely to ever read, a story of the human heart and all the great terrors and ecstasies within. It was also the book behind the cult horror film, Hellraiser.In a quiet house on a quiet street Frank and Julia are having an affair. Not your ordinary affair. For Frank it began with his own insatiable sexual appetite, a mysterious lacquered box- and then an unhinged voyage through a netherworld of imaginable pleasures and unimaginable horror… Now Frank - or what is left of Frank - waits in an empty room. All he wants is to live as he was before. All Julia can do is bring him her unfulfilled passions… and a little flesh and blood…

Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is a story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Lily Sabbath. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawkes, Hazel Motes founds The Church of God Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child, and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Hazel's existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdoms gives us one of the most riveting characters in twentieth-century American fiction.

Mark Renton has it all: he's good-looking, young, with a pretty girlfriend and a place at university. But there's no room for him in the 1980s. Thatcher's government is destroying working-class communities across Britain, and the post-war certainties of full employment, educational opportunity and a welfare state are gone. When his family starts to fracture, Mark's life swings out of control and he succumbs to the defeatism which has taken hold in Edinburgh's grimmer areas. The way out is heroin.It's no better for his friends. Spud Murphy is paid off from his job, Tommy Lawrence feels himself being sucked into a life of petty crime and violence - the worlds of the thieving Matty Connell and psychotic Franco Begbie. Only Sick Boy, the supreme manipulator of the opposite sex, seems to ride the current, scamming and hustling his way through it all.Skagboys charts their journey from likely lads to young men addicted to the heroin which has flooded their disintegrating community. This is the 1980s: a time of drugs, poverty, AIDS, violence, political strife and hatred - but a lot of laughs, and maybe just a little love; a decade which changed Britain for ever. The prequel to the world-renowned Trainspotting, this is an exhilarating and moving book, full of the scabrous humour, salty vernacular and appalling behaviour that has made Irvine Welsh a household name.

Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out—with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes—to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset.As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise, I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead...

\
  As I Lay Dying\
 is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members -- including Addie herself -- as well as others; the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, \
  As I Lay Dying\
 is a true 20th-century classic. This edition reproduces the corrected text of \
  As I Lay Dying\
 as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.

Ian McEwan’s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions Atonement follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.

Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.Publisher's Note: The 25th Anniversary Edition has been reset, causing the text to reflow. Page references based on earlier editions will no longer apply, so Vintage Books has compiled the following chart as a conversion aid. Download the chart by copying and pasting the following link into your browser:http://knopfdoubleday.com/marketing/B...

It is autumn 1981 when the inconceivable comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenage boy is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last—revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day.But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door—a girl who has never seen a Rubik's Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd. And she only comes out at night....

The book is always better than the film, but I'd never read 2001 before. What I didn't know, until reading the foreword, is that this novel was literally written in tandem with the film, with Clarke and Kubrick feeding each other ideas. At some points, however, filming overtook writing, or vice versa, and the two stories, though similar, split along two different paths. After reading the book, the film becomes little more than a very well crafted container: It's pretty and neat to look at it, but open it up, and it's empty. There is none of Clarke's vision of how a being we'd call God would communicate with us across unfathomable time spans, or teach us, or lead us into higher consciousness. Stripped away by Kubrick is the sense that this being truly wants us to be in its image, and that the whole breadcrumb trail of monoliths was designed to do just that. And completely erased is the notion that David Bowman, as Star Child, is now one with the Universe, in some Zen-like way, and also much more like something we'd called a god.Don't get me wrong, 2001 is still one of my favorite films, but to get the full meaning and understand the full weight of why 2001 has been called "the perfect science fiction story," you must read the book. Clarke marries science, mysticism, theory, and fantasy in ways like no other. Unfortunately, Kubrick stripped away the mysticism and theory and left us what is, in comparison to the book, only a glimmer at something bigger.Kubrick touched the monolith, but Clarke went inside.

In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.--jacket flap

Haunted is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter.The stories are told by people who have all answered an ad headlined 'Artists Retreat: Abandon your life for three months'. They are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of 'real life' that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But 'here' turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world - and where heat and power and, most importantly, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the stories they tell - and the more devious their machinations to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/non-fiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight.

In Ballard's hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an intentionally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting edge fiction, Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.

Science Imitating ArtJackson’s story was published in 1948. At the time, and since, it has been praised as insightful and criticised as obscure. But almost 20 years later, the French philosopher, Rene Girard, produced a theory which has a remarkable congruence with its theme and, I think, provides the best explanation of what Jackson was getting at in The Lottery.Girard argued that our individual desires are never the product of some inner longing but always rather of the imitation of others. We want what other people want. This he called ‘mimetic desire’ and Girard went on to explore the implications of this insight for the next half century.Mimetic desire, according to Girard, has a predictable trajectory that is familiar to advertising executives around the world. One person wants what another has, just because the other has it. This attracts the desire of others in a sort of exponential wave of wanting. But widespread wanting of anything means, first, a shortage of that commodity, and consequently the mutual antagonism of all those who share the same desire. Girard’s contention is that this incipient hostility threatens to create a sort of Hobbesian world, a non-society, in which no cooperative or coordinated action, including effective government, can be established.Human beings, Girard believed, deal with this situation unconsciously and instinctively by the mechanism of ‘scape-goating’, through which a group identifies one of its own members as the cause of its mimetic tension. This individual is both sacred and an object of communal hatred. The elimination of this individual is therefore not just necessary for the welfare of the community, but also forms the basis of religious practice in which the role of the scape-goat is transformed into a noble duty.Girard goes even further in his later work to claim that the ritual establishment of the scape-goat is the most primitive form of representation, and consequently of language, that human beings have demonstrated. In a sense the essential foundation for human power in the world is religious violence which victimizes random members or groups in modern society.Whether or not one agrees with Girard’s anthropology, and there is a substantial body of evidence to recommend it, his literary usefulness is demonstrated by the application of his theory to The Lottery. The theory explains, among other things the liturgical character of the story; its origins in a distant past; its particular relevance to a relatively isolated agricultural community; and its connection to a paternalistic hierarchy whose continued existence depends on the ritual. As far as I am aware, Girard did not read The Lottery; but since he was in America at the time he might have done. In any case, it is certainly remarkable that an author of fiction like Jackson could have written such a tight short story which captures so much of subsequent academic work. Thus demonstrating, if demonstration were needed, the tremendous importance of fiction to cultural life.For an introduction to Girard’s work see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

From acclaimed director Robert Eggers, The Northman is an epic revenge thriller that explores how far a Viking prince will go to seek justice for his murdered father.

The story of two low-level astronomers, who must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet earth.

A stripper named Zola embarks on a wild road trip to Florida.

Set in the international world of classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tár. widely considered one of the greatest living composer/conductors and first-ever female chief conductor of a major German orchestra.

A young couple travel to a remote island to eat at an exclusive restaurant where the chef has prepared a lavish menu, with some shocking surprises.

Mikey Saber is a washed-up porn star who returns to his small Texas hometown, not that anyone really wants him back.

The story will focus specifically on a young Willy Wonka and how he met the Oompa-Loompas on one of his earliest adventures.

The complex love of Leonard and Felicia, from the time they met in 1946 at a party and continuing through two engagements, a 25 year marriage, and three children.

A pair of models find themselves at a crossroads in their careers.

The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

Plot unknown. Sequel to the 2019 film 'Knives Out'.

A 1950's housewife living with her husband in a utopian experimental community begins to worry that his glamorous company may be hiding disturbing secrets.

psychological horror thriller film directed by Olivia Wilde

It's about a 55-year-old Chinese woman trying to finish her taxes.

A pair of lifelong friends on a remote Irish island find themselves at an awkward time in their relationship when one of them no longer wants to be friends.

A doll living in 'Barbieland' is expelled for not being perfect enough and sets off on an adventure in the real world. A Live-action feature film based on the popular line of Barbie toys.

The film will be a Victorian tale of love, discovery and scientific daring, Poor Things tells the incredible story of Belle Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by an eccentric but brilliant scientist.

<p>Robert Pickering "Bo" Burnham is an American comedian, musician, actor, and filmmaker. His work combines elements of filmmaking with comedy genres such as music, sketch, and stand-up, often with a dramatic or tragic twist.</p>

Set in the late 1970s, two FBI agents are tasked with interviewing serial killers to solve open cases.

Supernatural, semihistorical, horror anthology series, where each season is inspired by a different infamous or mysterious real life historical tragedy.

Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship.

A cynical young woman in New York City keeps dying and returning to the party that's being thrown in her honor on that same evening. She tries to find a way out of this strange time loop.

Follows a world-famous televangelist family with a long tradition of deviance, greed, and charitable work.

A tale of the bungling of Armageddon features an angel, a demon, an eleven-year-old Antichrist, and a doom-saying witch.

<p>Beef is an American comedy drama television series created by Lee Sung Jin for Netflix. It stars Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as two people whose involvement in a road rage incident begins to consume their lives. Appearing in supporting roles are Joseph Lee, Young Mazino, David Choe, and Patti Yasutake.</p>

A chronicle of the lives of a dysfunctional family who run an independent funeral home in Los Angeles.

Explores the early relationship between renowned psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter and a young FBI criminal profiler who is haunted by his ability to empathize with serial killers.

A dangerously charming, intensely obsessive young man goes to extreme measures to insert himself into the lives of those he is transfixed by.

Various chronicles of deception, intrigue and murder in and around frozen Minnesota. Yet all of these tales mysteriously lead back one way or another to Fargo, North Dakota.

A financial advisor drags his family from Chicago to the Missouri Ozarks, where he must launder money to appease a drug boss.

An anthology series based on popular Internet Creepypastas Candle Cove, The No-End House, Butcher's Block, and The Dream Door.

American anthology horror television series

An idiosyncratic FBI agent investigates the murder of a young woman in the even more idiosyncratic town of Twin Peaks.

American drama television series from 1990–1991

A semi-anthology series that centers on characters being terrorized by a serial killer in different locations, including a university and a hospital.

Set in a tropical resort, it follows the exploits of various guests and employees over the span of a week.

American satire comedy-drama television series from 2021's HBO

A series about a powerful friendship that blossoms between a tightly wound widow and a free spirit with a shocking secret.

It follows Louise, a single mom with a son and a part-time job in a psychiatrist's office. She begins an affair with her boss and strikes up an unlikely friendship with his wife.

Survivors of a devastating flu pandemic try to rebuild their lives after losing everything.

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