I don't ordinarily read non-fiction. I picked this one because I was interested in the history of comic books in America. I was instantly hooked by the depth of research, which features interviews with many of the writers and artists who experienced the events personally.
I was amazed to learn how extensive the comic publishing industry was prior to the 1960s, and how quickly the political groups opposed to the industry decimated it. More than that, it was eye-opening to realize that this was a story that I had never suspected existed.
I read this during Banned Books Week and I found it ironic that the literal book burnings that occurred during the comic book hysteria are forgotten today.
In the years between the end of World War II and the mid-1950s, American popular culture was first created in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. But no sooner had comics emerged than they were beaten down by mass bonfires, congressional hearings, and a McCarthyish panic over their unmonitored and uncensored content. Esteemed critic David Hajdu vividly evokes the rise, fall, and rise again of comics, in this engrossing history.
This book typifies what I love about Weird Fiction. It charts a slow descent from the mundane into the uncanny.
The protagonist is a film historian who discovers what may be an extremely significant fragment of an old movie, and in the process of tracking down the original print discovers hidden truths about an invisible world ruled by ancient gods.
It's hard to be specific about the plot, because the genius of the story is the author's ability to create a mood of escalating dread. In the best Weird Tales tradition, much of the horror lies in the narrator's inability to prove what she discovers. Something is going on, something terrifying, but every time she tries to understand exactly what it is the details shift and melt away.
The award-winning author of the Hexslinger Series "explores the world of film and horror in a way that will leave you reeling" (Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy).
Former film teacher Lois Cairns is struggling to raise her autistic son while freelancing as a critic when, at a screening, she happens upon a sampled piece of silver nitrate silent footage. She is able to connect it to the early work of Mrs. Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb, the spiritualist and collector of fairy tales who mysteriously disappeared from a train compartment in 1918.
Dusty lives in an underground bunker in his backyard. He’s been inside there for two years straight when the novel begins. He’s got food and water and electricity and a library of survival books and old movies on DVD. Outside his bunker the world has been taken over by a plague that transforms people into mindless monsters.
And while this sounds like a typical Zombie Survival story, it is Dusty himself that makes the book. He is a middle-aged blue-collar man, divorced, with three grown daughters who are now lost to him forever. While much of the book is laugh-out-loud funny, there is a disturbing core question: He knows how to survive, but he is wondering why.
Why bother? What does the last living man on Earth have to live for?
I played all those cool video games. I watched all those movies. I even read the books. In most of 'em, the hero shoots the bad guys, drives a sweet car, never gets hungry, and always seems to get laid by the end. Yeah. Whatever.
I gotta be straight with you about why I wrote this journal, and it comes down to one thing, the apocalypse kinda sucks. It doesn’t meet my expectations at all.
Honestly, I was looking forward to it. I mean, I really was. It’s not that I wanted to see everybody…
Ten Weird Tales. Some are science fiction, some are fantasy, some are hard to classify, but they are all intimate stories, focusing on ordinary people and the connections we make—and sometimes fail to make—with each other. My latest collection published by Cirsova, a leader in the New Pulp movement.
