Run run away

City of the Dead by Brian Keene (2005): Keene's sequel to his first novel, The Rising, is every bit as visceral, gonzo and thoughtful as that outing. Zombies have risen, but their lineage is of the Return of the Living Dead/ Evil Dead 2 variety. They talk, they think, they plan, and they use weapons. And they're not limited to human form: everything above the level of insects rises once it dies unless its brain is sufficiently destroyed. They're the first wave of body-possessing demons released by a particle accelerator experiment gone horribly awary, and there are trillions of them.

We follow the ragtag handful of survivors from the first novel as they try to find shelter. Or at least a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. Humanity's last redoubt is a high-security New York highrise run by someone a lot like Donald Trump. A second wave of demons that can possess plants and insects is on its way. Things are bad.

Keene's novels have the audacious scale and pacing of pulp apocalypses, but it's the care taken with sympathetic (or at least empathetic) characterization that really drives the engine, making us care about characters who are doomed. There's a greater whiff of Stephen King's The Stand in City of the Dead than there was in The Rising -- supernatural good exists and makes its presence (or at least its reasons) felt. Be warned, though: the violence is graphic and unrelenting, and there are no easy outs from the seemingly unwinnable situation Keene puts his dwindling cast of characters in. As they say in Preacher, "All hell's a coming." Highly recommended.

When Homeowners Attack

The Association by Bentley Little (2001): There's a great idea here, handled perhaps too much in the mode of occasionally clumsy social satire rather than straightforward horror. Barry, a horror writer, and his accountant wife Maureen move into what seems to be an idyllic gated community, complete with a Community Association, in Utah. But the rules for residents get stricter and stricter. People start dying mysteriously. And how does the Association always know when someone's violated its phonebook of rules?

One of the points of the novel is that 'groupthink' can cause even very good people to ignore the problems around them, to become passive. The gated community causes both Barry and Maureen to make bad decisions, and even bad indecisions, but this passivity in the face of an escalating threat becomes tiring after a couple of hundred pages. One one finds out that one's community association is mutilating and even killing troublesome residents, how long is one still going to fret about whether or not the association is going to play fair with oneself, or obey its own rules?

As social satire or even simply commentary on how good people can let bad things happen, the novel works, but the passivity and gormlessness of Barry and Maureen becomes wearisome as the danger to them and their friends escalates into all-out bloodshed, bloodshed they put up with because they're worried about how running away from their house (and their mortgage) would affect their credit rating. See what I mean about social satire?

Little's really in the territory of the late, great Thomas Disch and his four satiric horror novels of the 1980's and 1990's here, but the sharpness of Disch's wit and the efficient poeticism of Disch's prose allowed him to be scathingly funny and scary simultaneously. Little isn't a nuanced enough writer to pull off such a dual feat successfully.

The ending, when it comes, comes with a rush, and Little does a nice job of logicking out just how Barry can win against the sinister Board of the Association, though here, as in The Return, Little seems to be a little too enamoured of electricity as the great ward against evil. Tightened up and focused on either horror or more pointed social observation, this book could be terrific -- as is, the dragginess of the middle section caused me to skip entire pages of placeholder dialogue and description, which is what I call pages where we find out what everyone's eating and how they feel about it. Recommended with reservations.

Planet Lovecraft

Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, edited by Robert M. Price (1992): This is a lovely historical exercise by editor Price, as it collects about 20 stories in the Lovecraft mode, primarily from the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's, when Lovecraft's widespread Affinity Group, created in large part by Lovecraft's own inexhaustible letter-writing to aspiring writers asking for advice, was still in its infancy. Never has so peculiar a writer-as-person been so generous of his time with other writers. It's all part of the weirdness of HPL.

Price does a nice job selecting little- or never-before-anthologized stories by both significant writers working with Lovecraft's concepts and cosmology (August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, Clark Ashton Smith) and by writers whose names and stories have been long forgotten. I can't say as I was scared by the stories here, but a lot of them do evoke that existential dread and instability that is one of the hallmarks of the "cosmic horror" that Lovecraft tended to prefer.

Price's lengthy introduction is also invaluable, as it sets forth both a timeline for extra-Lovecraftian additions to the Cthulhu Mythos and an explanation of the manner in which certain writers and editors (most notably Derleth, Lovecraft's unbelievably important literary executor and Boswell in all but title) helped shape the Mythos after Lovecraft's death in 1937, giving it the now-familiar shape and hierarchy it didn't have during Lovecraft's lifetime.

And there were turfwars over Lovecraft's legacy -- Derleth was quite possessive of the Mythos, for good and ill, though overwhelmingly good: without the publishing house, Arkham House, Derleth initially created to preserve Lovecraft's work in hardcover, both Lovecraft and a lot of other fantasy writers might have vanished forever before the early 1960's boom in fantasy brought them widespread renown and paperback sales for the first time in their careers.

If Lovecraft's work now seems potentially immortal -- and possibly the single most important American fantasy corpus of the 20th century -- then Derleth deserves a lion's share of the credit. Often compared to Edgar Allan Poe, HPL possessed one major, posthumous difference from Poe: he had a great and tireless champion of his work taking care of it. Highly recommended.

The 35-Year-Old Bridesmaid

Bridesmaids, written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, directed by Paul Feig, starring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Jill Clayburgh, Chris O'Dowd, Jon Hamm, Ellie Kember, and Melissa McCarthy (2011): A very funny movie from the new distaff side of the Judd Apatow stable, this one could easily have been titled The 35-Year-Old Bridesmaid. Kristen Wiig, who co-wrote and stars, continues her evolution from occasionally annoying sketch comic to fully realized comic actress that began in this year's Paul. She's a passive-aggressive delight.

House of Apatow movies, when they work, work a lot like Animal House. Seriously. You've got comic bits shooting off everywhere, your actors are all solid, there are occasional nods to characterization and plot, and somewhere running through the movie is Bluto Blutarsky. Here, Bluto is Melissa McCarthy's character, a profane force-of-nature. She gets shackled with the movie's one major comic misstep (it involves puppies being cute), but also gets most of the good physical comedy.

The plot is pretty much what you'd expect from the advertising; the execution is terrific. Bridesmaids also manages to engage problems that can arise in friendships when income disparity occurs, but it does so pretty lightly. There's a great gross-out scene, a great scene on an airplane, a battle between Wiig and a giant cookie, two grotesque British roommates for Wiig, and some nice, comfortable exchanges between Wiig and Maya Rudolph, two long-time SNL chorts who work well together.

Jon Hamm, doing a more malign version of his Handsome Idiot character from 30 Rock, has a completely ridiculous scene trying to show his sensitivity by kneading Wiig's breasts like a clumsy pizza maker. All in all, a delightful romp. Fair is fair -- the male characters are pretty much as little-defined here as the female characters are in the male-dominated Apatow comedies. Highly recommended.

Ralph Sampson Agonistes

Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman (2010): Klosterman's musings on popular culture in the 21st century pretty much always combine insight with bizarre range. One 20-page essay is given over to assessing not just how good a basketball player Ralph Sampson was, but why Klosterman himself is obsessed with trying to assess how good a basketball player Ralph Sampson was...especially as Klosterman is a Boston Celtics fan and Sampson was never a Celtic (indeed, Sampson's most [in]famous NBA moment came when the 7'4" centre punched 6'1" Celtic back-up guard Jerry Sichting in a playoff game between the two teams). That sort of on-going self-assessment is one of Klosterman's strengths.

So is his ability to make initially strange but ultimately workable connections between, say, Pepsi marketing campaigns and President Obama's election, or the Branch Davidians and Nirvana's In Utero, or the Unabomber and, well, pretty much everything.

The last subject leads Klosterman into a fairly interesting maze of self-reflection and self-interrogation on his own belief that technology is invariably bad for humanity, a conclusion he admits is both hypocritical, given his use of technology, and possibly wrong, given what life for pre-technological humanity was like (actually, he doesn't deal at much length with this last conundrum. I guess there could always be a sequel).

In any case, Klosterman's funnier than Malcolm Gladwell and a better writer than Bill Simmons, the other two-thirds of the post-post-modern essayist Affinity Group he's part of. Highly recommended.

First, They Killed All the Masked Wrestlers

Monsters, written and directed by Gareth Edwards, starring Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able (2010): Made for something on the order of $800,000, Monsters manages to weave desktop special effects and found footage into an enjoyably creepy trek through a Mexico "infected" by alien life brought back on a U.S. space probe from Europa. Right now, all the best horror movies seem to be made for almost no money at all. Kudos!

In Monsters, an American photojournalist gets tasked by his boss to find and return the boss's vacationing daughter to the U.S. before the annual shutdown of the land route back to the U.S. through the Infected Zone occurs. So they try to make it back behind the giant wall that's been erected across the U.S. border with Mexico. That's pretty much the entire movie.

The "monsters" are cleverly kept mostly off-stage until the last five minutes or so, while the effects of their occupation of what looks to be the entire Yucatan Peninsula are nice bits of cinematic misdirection and appropriation (ruined hotels and skyscrapers, sunken fighter planes, and a whole lot of death).

The leads are affable, though Scoot McNairy's resemblance to Skeet Ulrich gets distracting at certain points. You'll want to rewind to the beginning and watch the first five minutes again once you're done, and get ready to freeze frame. Highly recommended.

Return of the Monster with the Orange Afro

The Return by Bentley Little (2002): So far as I can tell, this is the prolific Little's worst-reviewed novel. I thought it was great, though the gonzo, cuckoobanana stuff that I like probably turned a lot of people off. There haven't been a lot of supernatural beings in the history of literature who spend a fair amount of time turning people into porcelain-statue versions of themselves, or a lot of horror novels in which people get attacked by animated Anasazi mortar-and-pestles, fetishes, shards of pottery and assorted knicknacks.

Actually, none that I can think of. This is the only mainstream horror novel I've ever read which could realistically be described in a cover blurb as "Stephen King meets The Flaming Carrot."

Western writer Zane Grey (yes, the real Zane Grey) shows up early to be terrified by some crazy-ass something-or-other in Arizona back in the early 20th century. Then we jump to the present. Various Southwest-Native-American artifacts are starting to come to life across the Southwest. A mysterious monster kills a Boy Scout counselor. Dogs and cats are living together. Scary, non-human skeletons with still-growing orange afros have been excavated or found in various places. Denver is burning. Boulder is burning. Entire towns vanish from the map, never to return.

What eliminated the Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs, Anasazi, Olmecs and every other civilization ever, including perhaps the Hittites and Saxons? A race of superbeings with orange afros. And they are back with a vengeance!

Crazy shit happens. A plucky group of plucky people assemble to save humanity from these civilization-destroying creatures. Things get so rushed at the end that I'm going to assume editorial interference occurred. I'm not sure really how good this novel is, but it kept me reading quickly, and it was never boring. Recommended.