My other October tradition, along with binging on horror movies and sharing my thoughts on them with no one in particular, is reading a scary book or two. For whatever reason my taste in horror novels is a little narrower than my taste in horror movies, so for the last couple years I’ve ended up re-reading two books in particular: John Dies at the End, and its sequel, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don’t Touch It. They’re creepy, gruesome, funny, crass, unsettling, and manage to subvert urban fantasy genre tropes, while maintaining their own identity (you’ll see the term “existential dread” thrown around a lot in discussions of the series, with good reason).
So today was movieless, as I tore through the just-released third book in the aforementioned series, ‘What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror.’ It’s past my bedtime now, so I’ll keep it brief and spoiler-free: It was, in fact, a very good use of my time.