Strange Country

THE WRITING OF ANDREW LAVIGNE

[westrangecountry]

Review: The Nice House on the Lake Vol. 1 (2021-2022) by James Tynion IV & Alvaro Martinez Bueno

Comic writer James Tynion IV first came up on my radar through an 8 page back up for Scott Snyder’s Batman run. The story was a series of characterful vignettes connecting the extended Bat-family (Robin, Batgirl, etc.) by showing the moment Batman inspired them to be a better person in some way but long before they became actual superheroes. It was effective and inspiring, and all done in 8 pages. I knew immediately either a) this is a skilled writer, or b) he got very lucky, as writers tend to do at least once, and would never do work of this quality again. 

My first experience with Tynion’s longer work is The Nice House on the Lake, not his currently more popular Something is Killing the Children, but guess what? Tynion isn’t lucky, he’s good. 

The fatiguing effects of the now overused decompressed comics storytelling, where a single conversation can be a full 20+ page issue, are not here. The same efficiency of story as with the Batman back up is present in The Nice House on the Lake, though this is not a superhero joint. This is—I think it is best described as sci-fi horror mystery.

To give you a better idea of what this whole thing is, the plot: a loosely connected group who all share one friend in common, Walter, get invited by Walter to a vacation week at a lake house. As everyone is chowing down and swimming on the first night, social media is suddenly flooded with news of mass death across the country. Less invasion, it's closer to extinction. It’s similar to a nuke attack, but stranger, leaving buildings intact but filling human beings with an intense burning feeling until their skin falls off. The skies glow cloudy and red. Walter reveals he is part of the attack and that he invited the friends he made over the years so that they would be saved in the part prison, part paradise lake house. 

This is only the first issue's worth of plot, and the mysteries only expand outward even as potential answers appear. What is Walter? What and why did all of humanity die? Why did he save them? What are the mysterious statues, like avant-grade art mixed with Buddhist temple sculptures, decorating the lake house? Why is there a stash of weapons inside the house? To find out, you will have to give it a shot yourself—the joy of discovery is strong in the first six issues of the story.

But comics are not just written into being, they are drawn, and Tynion is well-paired here with Alvaro Martinez Bueno. I have seen his past work on Batman Eternal, where he was just one of many artists, and while I don’t necessarily recall those he has a fluid take here that makes scenes flow. Hard to say without seeing a script how much of this is dictated by it, but this is a comic where each panel size and style is effective and considered as a whole. The writing alone wouldn’t carry in the hands of a bad artist. Characters are distinct, with recognizable profiles, too, which is important in this type of story: we might take a few issues to remember names and exact relations with 12-13 key characters all dropped in issue #1 but we can recognize them when they pop in and out. 

Special props must be given to the covers, also by Bueno. They have a presentation like the viewer is there with a phone or low grade DSLR and the flash on, capturing a different one of our protagonists in a normal scene with a dark twist. E.g., the first issue has a girl swimming in the lake but it’s full of skeletons. They all nicely capture the pleasant paradise of the setting with the offness that makes this horror. The voyeuristic nature of the covers also makes me wonder if they are all foreshadowing.

To say more would be to ruin the potential for new readers to discover The Nice House on the Lake, but for lovers of anything from character drama, horror, or unraveling a mystery that already has some wild twists take the trip. The commitment is just 12 issues for a complete story - due to be wrapped up August 2022 - and collected across only two trade paperbacks. It’ll just be some fun in the sun, I promise. 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

[westrangecountry]

Review: The Hollow Man (1935) - John Dickson Carr

I won't be long about this: so many people have read and written about Carr in the last century, but if you want a picture of the ideal Golden Age Mystery novelist, it's him. None of Christie's strange racism (the Australians set you off, Agatha? really? when will Branagh get to that one) but all of her plotting skill in creating unique puzzle-murders. Certain other Golden Agers are so sparse in their detail we scarcely find anything beyond their clues, but Carr can paint a scene with oozing atmosphere as much as he can drop a joke.

He is also not satisfied with one impossible murder where the killer must have been capable of floating over thin air to do the deed, but a whooping two! It's rare to find such a generous author nowadays.

The Hollow Man is one of his most well known works and a bit more meta feeling than the others I've experienced - it's less commentary and more playfulness. The solution to the two impossible murders here is simple, but it makes so much sense that you have to agree with the circus performer Carr has lampshade things: would you have really preferred actual magic? All it takes is one good trick to fool people.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: one important thing I must point out. The ebook edition available on Amazon at the time of reading is for lack of a more critical word straight up garbage. The final chapter and a half were not included in the book! If I wasn't groaning about that it would be the random spaces, bad formatting, and constant typos. Find a print copy for now.

[westrangecountry]

Review: Brothers of the Wind (2021) by Tad Williams

Mention the word prequel and what comes to mind? Star Wars, probably. Maybe Better Call Saul. Tad Williams’ newest novel in his world of Osten Ard is more Better Call Saul than Star Wars.

Set 1,000 years before his classic fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow and Thorn this book is a similar story type shift to the lawyer spinoff of Breaking Bad. Memory, Sorrow and Thorn inspired George R.R. Martin and led to Game of Thrones: an army of pale elf-like people called the Norns descend from the snowy North, beyond a wall called The Wall, during an all-consuming winter to seek revenge.

That trilogy is a quest narrative that still wanted to add complexity to the genre, especially for 80s fantasy. The enemies have a genuine motive beyond evil to avenge a genocide, even if they are misguided and misled. Even on the good side, no one is too ready to help each other for petty reasons. Cultural differences prevent those that do. Etc. But Brothers of the Wind is set at the tail end of a Golden Age for the Norn and their “cousins,” the equally immortal Sithi, and presents a different picture of the world some might know and others might discover.

This book’s plot is very simple, very welcoming to new readers: a dragon is killing in human lands and the prideful Sithi Ineluki swears an oath to kill the dragon himself. Ineluki’s brother, Hakatri pursues him to try and stop him from killing himself, while a loyal servant named Pamon Kes narrates.

Rare for a fantasy book, no one is at war or threatening to go to war in the entire novel. Tangents are Williams speciality—his strength, in truth, for creating such dense worlds that they feel more real—but Brothers of the Wind is a focused narrative. The other Osten Ard books are third person, but this is first person.

At first our narrator Pamon Kes, a servant from a race formerly fully slaves to the Sithi, seems curiously without interior. This is completely intentional. As the novel develops, a novel that he insists is only about those greater than himself, like his master Hakatri or the prideful Ineluki who will go on to become one of the central villains of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, Kes develops that missing self. In the early sections, he had only been living for those who look down on him (if they even look on him at all). It couldn’t be written in anything other than first person.

This main thread of the quest to kill the dragon lets Williams show that despite the world being in a Golden Age, with no war threatened and even their more violence loving Norn cousins up North freely welcoming to a visit, the seeds of this society’s destruction is plain. Nor is this Golden Age innocent.

Kes encounters ghettos of his own people while the surrounding Sithi go on with self-involved happiness, barely aware of the suffering they profit from. This isn't the generic whips and slurs portrayal of prejudice from other fantasy novels, but a more realistic one, done with a welcoming smile.

Elsewhere, some ignore a threat as basic and universal as a rampaging dragon. We're not effected right now, maybe we will be in the future but that's not now, so it's not our problem. There are no looming threats, as I said, but self-interest rules: what else could bring about actual threats in future books but that?

The first half of Brothers of the Wind is the quest to kill the dragon, but Osten Ard fans will know this is only the start of the story. The outcome of Ineluki’s pride is that Hakatri is horribly burned by the dragon’s fire. The rest is surprisingly sprawling for a sub-300 pages novel, taking readers on a whirlwind tour of places only whispered of as once existing in the main Osten Ard novels.

Meanwhile, hints for the currently ongoing sequel books The Last King of Osten Ard are drip fed in and pieces of the overall series lore are even delivered up. One scene in particular will leave readers of the sequels debating until the conclusion of Last King is released.

In other words, this is way more book than you would expect. A story of brothers. A story of self-realization from Pamon Kes. A story of a world teetering, not yet on the brink, the brink not even visible, but too busy patting itself on the back over past glories to realize it is there.

Like the best prequels, it adds to what came before instead of taking away with meaningless fan service. Certain tangents in Memory, Sorrow and Thorn take on far more meaning. Depth is added to a supporting character from it and the Last King books by seeing her as a small child.

I won’t reveal how, or why. But most of all, the story of Hakatri we had heard—and his brother Ineluki with him—is revealed to be a glow up. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” as L.P. Hartley wrote. Differently in people’s cases tends to mean better. More as we wished it had been done. The Tolkien comparison is overused in fantasy reviews, but it fits here: this is tragic myth, melancholic and wistful.

As much as the new books in this world have impressed me for their massive scope, complex plot, sense of approaching doom, subtly, and weaving of themes tightly into narrative I am once again left surprised by a new Tad Williams novel. Brothers of the Wind is not what I expected, which makes it the perfect prequel in a landscape of Star Wars prequel wannabes.

Where should you start these Osten Ard books? That's up to you. This one is a welcoming pick up to new readers, since Kes is writing a memoir he can quickly explain a custom or person to the reader, the shorter page count commitment, and focused narrative. Of course, this novel will pay off some lore mysteries built up in the others, which is part of what makes it such an effective prequel, one missing tile to a vast, beautiful mosaic.

[westrangecountry]

31 Horror Movies of my October 2021 in one paragraph each (Reviews)

Purchase the collage on Etsy.

The Legacy (1978)

Mostly forgettable Gothic that feels like a missed the boat Hammer Horror film. Some dreamy photography and disturbingly mustache-free Sam Eliot make it an OK watch. Rating: C

Toolbox Murders (1978)

Much more craft to this than I expected. The opening 10 minutes or so pass by with scarcely a word uttered beyond a car radio, a surreal mix of nighttime 70s Los Angeles streets mixed with increasingly gruesome, pointless murder as news broadcasters and preachers rave. Excellent atmosphere. Unfortunately, most of the acting, especially the male lead, is “rough” at best…with the exception of genre star Cameron Mitchell as a man who might be the killer, who gets a solid 12 minutes straight to take over a scene and explain his madness almost directly to the audience in a riveting unfolding of a heart. Rating: B-

Tourist Trap (1979)

Puppet Master director’s earlier slasher. Everything from mannequins to psychic powers is here and there is a lot to like, but it never pulled together for me. Still an interesting watch I can recommend. C+

Hausu (1977)

How Japan’s involvement in World War II and the Atomic Bomb goes on to hurt the next generation of their youth, but as a psychedelic, borderline whimsical, series of supernatural murders. Under comedy lies the tragedy. Seemingly every cinematic technique is deployed, sometimes at once, in an audacious display of craft. For fans of Lynch…and Evil Dead. A+

When a Stranger Calls (1979)

Nearly 25 minute, edge of the seat cold open that inspired Scream is the stuff engrossing Hitchcock (or Carpenter) style suspense is made of. By the time the title dropped, I was expecting a masterpiece, then the remaining 65 minutes happened. The film loafs around, chronicling the escaped killer almost strictly to his POV, as he actually tries to not kill, be a normal person, but is forced by pressures around him into murder. That sounds like it would make for a gripping psychological study or satire, but it doesn’t - not here. C-

Final Destination (2000)

Strange preceding the 9/11 decade of horror with a film about a plane crash and terrorism suspicion. Balances the dark humor with actual characterization and musing on grief, making the kids feel pretty real. Even in the first installment there’s an all-timer death as we watch a teacher get set on fire by her computer, blown across a room, hit by exploding glass, have a knife fall into her, a chair fall and hammer the knife in more, and her house explode. Ending still feels like no one knew how to end this thing, but fair enough. Tony Todd the GOAT. A-

Sole Survivor (1984)

Final Destination’s inspiration but played more straight. Instead of accidents, we mostly have specters of the dead haunting the survivor. Eerie, its strength is almost more in its sense of pervading isolation, no matter if its your own house or the middle of a crowded city. Everything is so still, so dead. Only taking it down some for a repetitive feeling middle. B+

Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher (1979)

With all due respect to Joe Bob Briggs, but the production’s cheapness lends this a surreal off-kilter vibe that gets old fast. No dialogue since it was all lost, so we only have narration by the killer as he stalks very real LA streets. Might be worth sampling the first few scenes to get the general idea of it but even 1 hour 15 minutes seems like twice the length if all you have is scenes of a guy narrating why he hates sluts before cutting someone up. F+

Trilogy of Terror (1975)

Three adaptations of horror author Richard Matheson’s stories with Karen Black as a different role in each, only one of which is really worth anything. “Julie” is Hot For Teacher Gone Wrong and ends where it should only be getting started. “Millicent and Therese” is a see it a mile away twist without a story. “Amelia” is about a possessed Zulu hunter doll trying to murder the titular woman in her apartment and is what makes this anthology still talked about (also the only one actually adapted by Matheson himself - it shows): captures the short story well, works around only having a doll prop with creative camera angles, and is a steady build to all out chaos. Haunting final scene that brings the emotional backbone of the short into focus, too. C+, D-, B+ respectively.

Final Destination 2 (2003)

Hiring a stunt actor turned director and going full black edgy comedy was the right move since you can’t recapture the original. We were all in that place in 2003, anyway. The opening accident has to be seen to be believed, just pure madness. B

Silent Scream (1979)

Once again, Cameron Mitchell strikes. OKish if predictable slasher here with decent enough atmosphere and a sense that the film makers really wanted it to be more. It isn’t, but that’s ok. C+

The Curse of Kazuo Umezu (1990)

Anime anthology adaptation of two stories by Junji Ito’s main inspiration, Kazuo Umezu - AKA the guy responsible for the manga behind the “This is my hole! It was made for me!” meme. The first story, “What Will the Video Camera Reveal?” Is a slow build to a deranged climax and sort of a vampire story. The clear standout of the two. The second is called “The Haunted Mansion” is no slouch, but can’t live up to the first since it has less time to work with. Expect body horror in both. B+

Final Destination 3 (2006)

Was not with this at all for the first half, the mostly CGI based accidents feeling like cheap imitations, but the back half goes strong. As far as death based set piece settings go a town’s July 4th bash is an inspired one. ALSO: suggests 9/11 was another Final Destination type event in Death’s Plan? B-

The Laughing Target (1987)

Who knew the creator of Inuyasha did a straight up horror with some of the same otherworldly love triangle elements earlier in her career? Short anime adaptation full of strikingly beautiful backgrounds, sensuous as it is at times forbidding. Captures the tragedy of love gone wrong well. B+

Vampyr (1932)

Going to admit I could barely pay attention to this one beyond some striking black and white camera work of shadows on walls early on. Sorry Carl Dryer gang. N/A

Mortuary (1983)

Feels a bit like Dead & Buried at first. Strange secrets around a funeral home. Old secrets people kill for. Not remotely as good, but plenty charming. Bill Paxton as a nerdy high schooler who skips to class in sweater vests and tries to pick up dates by bragging about his new Mozart vinyl is worth a watch, especially as he is revealed to be the killer sneaking about in a Phantom of the Opera style get up. C+

Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1983)

Begins with the implication that a husband and wife are murdered in an auto accident by the wife’s sister so she can raise their toddler and groom him - gets darker from there. Labeled as a slasher, for the first hour this is pretty deathless other than a single murder by the reverse Mrs. Bates psycho aunt, but features a harrowing depiction of railroaded justice as an equally nightmarishly to the aunt police chief does everything in his power to get the wrong man. The man who the aunt murdered was gay and the now teen adopted boy has a gay coach, so in the mind of the chief the aunt is covering for the boy…and not the other way around. I haven’t seen the actor who plays him before, but there’s a normalcy to everything he does that’s terrifying. This all climaxes in a bonkers final act that is absolutely and fully a slasher, with but with a role reversed “final boy”. They go all out: decapitations, people set on fire, a Cape Fear-esque Biblical battle in water. A-

Just Before Dawn (1981)

Slasher set in the woods that starts out pretty well but reveals its killed halfway through as a redneck with big bushy eyebrows and a pot belly. All the great atmosphere of the woods at night vanishes. Some decent kill effects remain. C+

Final Destination 4 (2009)

Without 3D the CGI stands out pretty badly. The stupidest one, but entertaining and I appreciate the meta of one of these ending in a movie theater. C+

Phobia (1980)

John Huston retire bitch only good he didn’t because he bounced back somehow to make The Dead. F+

Nightmares (1980)

You mean the female lead with the traumatic childhood in the mostly male cast is the very obviously telegraphed as female killer? What a mystery! D

Funeral Home (1980)

Homely Southern slasher. Doesn’t get as much out of the funeral home bed and breakfast (!) gimmick as you’d expect but has some charm. C

Final Destination 5 (2011)

Cool twist gimmick (“take a life, save your own life”) is only deployed in the final 30 minutes for a few scenes. Intro accident is once again impressive. Takes a long time to slowly establish the rules despite being the last one of these ever. The big twist at the end got me and it connects most of the series in a way I didn’t expect. C+

The Unseen (1980)

Goes for sadness more than creepiness and works well for it. Like the better monster movies, the real monster is just man putting his own desires ahead of his good. Excellent scene where we get the background on the dad as his actor’s goofy and sweet facade crumbles to reveal a demented, self-interested schemer by having him talk directly to camera. B

Windows (1980)

Godfather cinematographer in one of his few directorial efforts. Talia Shire is a woman violently assaulted by a man, hired by a woman obsessed with her. Much more emotionally focused and careful with handling this sort of storyline for something from 1980 than I would ever expect. Climax isn’t a series of bodies but a whispered conversation on a roof ending in tears. B

Deadly Games AKA Dial Code Santa Claus

Clear inspiration for Home Alone, but this is part horror, part fairy tale, all French. An unknown man who comes to believe he is Santa Claus stalks a rich young boy and his grandpa in their family’s mansion. The boy must fight back using traps, but this isn’t Home Alone, this is very R-rated. At times whimsical, at times tense, this one is taken to another level by massive amounts of effort put into the actual film making of the simple story. i.e., the boy is stuck on the roof and it zooms out until the winter struck building is like something caught in a snow globe. A+

Night of the Demon (1980)

Bigfoot rips a random bypasser's dick off in graphic detail. B-

Without Warning (1980)

For a film about a stereotypical green alien being a slasher and doing Predator in the backwoods of America, this is mostly uneventful. Led by stars Cameron Mitchell, Martin Landau, and Jack Palance we’re mostly treated to POV shots of a shadow in the woods and kills almost all consist of following a sci-fi boomerang as it guts someone. Every time. D+

He Knows You’re Alone (1980)

Tom Hanks is fully formed as a charismatic actor in his first major role as a Slasher Boyfriend who is dating one of the brides stalked by a killer. More effort than expected on the mood of each locale, but mostly boring. C-

Sledgehammer (1983)

First direct to video horror film in existence, made by a porn producer and his crew of regulars over a week. Remember what I said about the cheapness of Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher giving it an off kilter vibe? It’s that, but it doesn’t get old - ever. Like an alien impression of a film, or a Neil Breen slasher. B+

Society (1989)

Brian Yunza might not quite have his friend Stuart Gordon’s skill, but this is an impressive debut that’s also thoroughly sickening for how much it Just Goes For It. Eat the rich before they eat the poor, literally. A-

Fade to Black (1981)

Highly biographic movie about a Film Twitter guy losing it and going after people in ways that mimic old Hollywood movies. The he deaths are highly entertaining and you do get to see Mickey Rourke play a jock bully type who gets gunned down in an alley by a cowboy, but the build up trying to make the lead film geek sympathetic before he snaps is entirely too long and unearned. C+

Don’t Go in the Woods (1981)

Commits the cardinal sin of Just Before Dawn by fully revealing the slasher as something not quite threatening but does it even quicker and without the skillful atmosphere building of that film. Cheapness of it did make me chuckle. You could see them having something more with it all being about people who go into the woods and lose their humanity, turning into killers, but there’s just no skill. D

As Above, So Below (2014)

The most accurate Tomb Raider movie despite not having much in the way of action. A crew of explorers led by a British woman who wants to prove a crazy claim of her father descends into the catacombs under Paris, entering Hell itself where they must confront their sins to escape. Even has some Tomb Raider puzzle solving. Feels not entirely horror until the end, but a fun adventure type movie on a small budget. B

Saturn 3 (1980)

Nice intro scenes free of dialogue and cool retro sci-fi production design flow into a mostly silly movie about Harvey Keitel trying to seduce a bland Farrah Fawcet away from Kirk Douglas. Keitel is out of his element. Oh, and British novelist Martin Amiss (!) wrote the screenplay somehow. I think it is meant to be a heavily satirical look at the future of man, with Douglas as the aging last remnant of how we used to be (are now) and Keitel as the amoral, cold and calculating man of the future. Of course the killer robot the movie suddenly becomes about eventually wears his head and talks with his voice. C+

Terror Train (1980)

Just an all around fun time with a killer whose gimmick is that he changes costumes with each kill, so he's sort of an Invisible Man at times. Strong cast, unique location for the slasher of a train that I'm surprised doesn't get repeated (if you have even stock footage of an exterior you can reuse one or two set rooms infinitely for cheap), and a tense climax. B+

Sweet Sixteen (1983)

Low budget direct to video slasher that also tries to tackle racism against Native populations. Way ahead of Halloween Kills on being about mob justice and unfocused violence in a slasher, but not so smartly decides to have a character lynched entirely off-screen so we don’t feel the effect. Patrick MacNee does not seem like he should be the father of a small town America girl who has no trace of accent. C

Kwaidan (1965)

A staggering work, a masterpiece, it is all it is said to be. The poetics of its horror cannot be understated. Eyes watch from winter backdrops. One section is entirely narrated in song. Doomed love and doomed honor abounds. A+

Eyes of a Stranger (1981)

Competent slasher about a man who calls a news anchor before every kill. Goes Rear Window later and uses its seaside apartment set well for suspense, but nothing special beyond the stellar takedown of the killer. C+

Invisible Man (2020)

I meant to catch this in theaters before everything that happened in 2020 did, wish I had managed it. The Invisible Man character has always been a man turned into a criminal by lack of eyes on him, the lack of others witnessing him letting his worst impulses go out of control: the update here is that he already is a criminal with a degree of invisibility provided by wealth and status as a tech innovator. Speaking of tech, here the largeness of the frame itself is a threat. Leigh Whannell fills shots with openness, goes out further than usually needed even for simple conversations between two characters: the implication in our minds is clear, the invisible man might be - probably is - somewhere at work in these scenes. Sometimes your suspicions are rewarded, sometimes not. Features a twist that actually makes the rest of the movie make more sense, not less, when it hits. A

Absurd (1981)

Does not live up to its title all the time but good goofy fun. A priest with a gun and a thin backstory about creating a super soldier (?) pursues Florentine Michael Myers, who is a guy with tousled hair and a beard. The most Italian portrayal of an American town celebrating the Super Bowl. The main house is possibly a countryside villa. C+

So what did I get out of 2021's horror crop?:

1. Golden Age Slashers (70s-80s) were of higher quality than expected, even if only a few stood out as gems (Unseen, Terror Train) in their own right, but boy there sure are a lot of them. I set out with a goal of seeing all of them in chronological order and even not needing to check out the franchise ones (Halloween, Friday, etc.) and some other major ones (The Prowler) I never even reached 1984.

2. Final Destination feels like the franchise of the 00s next to Saw. The black comedy and focus on seemingly random, senseless Rube Goldberg deaths fits the nihilism of the world at the time, murder made into clockwork not unlike Jigsaw. As we all know now, there is always another accident around the corner.

3. Bigfoot graphically ripped off that bypasser's dick for no reason!

Happy Halloween...again and again.

The 31 one paragraph reviews will return in 2022.

[westrangecountry]

Review: Empire of Grass (2019) by Tad Williams

Middle entries in trilogies are hard. There is a reason why "Middle Book Syndrome" exists. In Empire of Grass, the second installment of The Last King of Osten Ard (itself a sequel to the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn “trilogy” that inspired writers from George R.R. Martin to Patrick Rothfuss), Tad Williams manages to kick the syndrome through the cure of sheer obsessive planning and some crafty edit work. It is a good book. More: it is a great book, a stand out for me in what could be a packed year. So, if you wanted the most spoiler free review possible, that is it—It Is Good, Very Good, click the red X. But lend me your eyes a bit more and I’ll keep this as spoiler free as possible. How did a good-or-great middle book happen, let alone one with such expert pace? Williams’ own first trilogy has a good second book, Stone of Farewell, but one that suffers from a slow opening and a mind-boggling amount of locations and characters after a first book mainly focused on a single character whose naive eyes slowly reveal the world. Like most second entries, Stone of Farewell is character and world heavy, but only moves the overall story forward at the end. In Empire of Grass, there are no new POVs. There are no new plots that require chapters of setup to establish locations and players. It just picks up, sometimes moments after the end of The Witchwood Crown, and moves on. This gives the trilogy the feeling of an actual trilogy, of what that used to mean in the genre: it’s a single story in three parts, not three stories that form an even bigger story. Keeping it spoiler free, some scattered reactions: If you didn’t like Morgan in Witchwood, you might like him a lot more here. I did. (More interestingly, his arc is more about the ways he is not like Simon - the hero of the first trilogy and his grandfather. ) Two characters traveling with each other begin to flip characterization until each seems to become more like the other person, and it's left completely to the reader to realize instead of being obnoxiously sign posted. There are sad, personal little betrayals of trust that feel as heavy as any other fantasy novel's thousand man massacre. Humor, too. The themes of volume one are just as present as before. The past repeating itself, the young taking up old vendettas, and the same old mistakes being made are most notably crystalized in a line where a character sees destruction that gives them deja vu about events in the original trilogy that "the past had returned to burn the future." But the broader ideas also expand to new directions, including the role of women in the world, both as heroes and villains and everyday women. There are other big ideas, too:

“Saying peace never lasts, or that an empire must grow or die, is like saying that only birth and death matter,” she told him. “Most of life is not part of either, but what comes between--the simple hard work of living.”

The overall thrust of the narrative has more adventure than book one. Even in the final action set piece that plays us out, Williams simultaneously sets the stage for a new mystery that could lead to a huge, huge twist. This volume ups the stakes considerably, its ending pages effectively conveying how totally overwhelmed from every angle, internal and external, the cast is to the point where the final pages hit me with a tangible feeling of how beaten down some of them are, enemies at every turn and doom behind every door.

Of course, this being a true trilogy that feels like one story sliced into three more bindable volumes, it ends with a series of cliffhangers for each POV, and if you found the twists at the end of The Witchwood Crown making you wish you could pick up a second book, they pale to the ones here as the book builds to an apocalyptic panorama approaching a Hironymous Bosch painting in scope and fury and strange beauty.

[westrangecountry]

Review: Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov

In awe and wishing I had more constructive thoughts, but what could I add that has not been said? Nabokov is funny enough to get away with describing suicide for two pages straight only to draw a chuckle; profound enough he can spend a page on mundane life details and sweep you away with passion. He's just that good. This the sort of art that makes you want to have already experienced everything else by the creator by the time the final page turns.

[westrangecountry]

Review: Beren and Luthien (2017), by J.R.R. Tolkien

Fiction, poetry, and scholarship all at once: to tell a single narrative, Christopher Tolkien has edited together different drafts of his father J.R.R.’s story involving the titular characters, ranging from 1915 (and before The Hobbit) to after The Lord of the Rings was published. Characters change names, backgrounds twist and entire writing styles shift from chapter to chapter. What we see is not a cohesive whole, but a kaleidoscope of Tolkien's creativity over about 30 years. I'm not sure if the work is greater for having not been finished or not - I think it might be. There is something even more mythic about a tale that ends not with a definitive end, but the narration telling us that no mortal men ever saw the characters again because they traveled into far off lands and that no one knows where their bones might rest. No wonder Tolkien had trouble finishing: there was probably no more to say than that. But the contributions by his son add to the work, as we jump from one paragraph reading about the world of Middle-Earth to the next about his father dying with the work unfinished, to Christopher himself preparing to pass now that the book is finished, fiction and life blending into a story of stories.

[westrangecountry]

Review: The Witchwood Crown by Tad Williams (2017)

The Witchwood Crown continues Tad Williams’ seminal fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn while standing equally tall on its own in a more crowded book market, starting a new trilogy called The Last King of Osten Ard. 1988 was a different time for those massive tomes, and this first volume of the new trilogy knows that.

Instead of blindly repeating the threat of the original trilogy or copy-pasting in a new one, The Witchwood Crown takes the much more interesting route of being a sequel about how history can repeat if we aren’t careful to learn from our past. Think World War I only leading to World War II, with a small peace in-between.

The original trilogy dealt with the elf-like Norns and their Big Bad type Storm King, victims in the past of genocide at the hands of human invaders, threatening to do the same by exterminating the human race. The new trilogy manages to reintroduce the Norns as antagonists with a well-developed characterization and society of their own while upping the scale of the threat considerably. No spoilers on that front here, but readers of the original trilogy may have a good idea of what that threat could be.

Instead of shoving the old characters out of the limelight to hand over the reigns to a young and sexy cast (like so many TV and film reboots), or shock killing them off early on to score some Game of Thrones imitator gravitas, The Witchwood Crown makes them central players alongside a new cast. The book itself is a blending of the old and new styles of popular fantasy: there are adventures in astonishingly described locales, comedy that had me chuckling, and youthful innocence; there is also a harder tone to the violence, there are backstabbing political machinations, and scenes of melancholy.

There are about sixteen point of views throughout the book located in a handful of diverse locations across the land of Osten Ard, so Williams can switch effortlessly between story types, tones, and styles. Riots, potential civil war, old allies turning their coats, the Norns preparing for war again, trade battles, cults...the book has a little of everything.

More importantly, this new book not only manages to carry on the tradition of older fantasy while blending it with the new, it manages to have something human to say. A grand emotion or a theme. Most of Williams’ work does. That might not seem like much, but when too many writers are intent on throwing out RPG spreadsheets or, on the other hand, grimdark violence, it’s rare to read something with big ideas to match its big locations and creatures that can still be entertaining.

Just because a bunch of armies came together and fought a big battle together doesn’t mean the animosity between the factions vanishes for good. Just because one battle ends and peace is declared doesn’t mean that peace is forever. Again: think World War I to World War II. And just as in that real world history, by the end of The Witchwood Crown the entire land of Osten Ard seems primed to explode at each other based on fear, lies, and greed rooted in past hurts.

At the opening of the first part (a nice touch—each of the three sections of the book is named after the debris of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn’s war: Widows, Orphans, and Exiles), the backbone of the book (and presumably the trilogy) is summed up with a poem by Hsu Chao:

Locusts laid their eggs in the corpse Of a soldier. When the worms were Mature, they took wing. Their drone Was ominous, their shells hard. Anyone could tell they had hatched From an unsatisfied anger.

With all of this to praise, The Witchwood Crown is an easy recommend to both new readers and fans of Williams: a great start to what could be a new classic trilogy.

This review made possible via digital ARC provided by the publisher Penguin’s First to Read program.

[westrangecountry]

Review: The Heart of What Was Lost (2017) by Tad Williams

Ever wonder what happens to those big evil armies after the end of an epic fantasy? In The Heart of What Was Lost, they're not all as uniformly evil as we thought, as Williams paints a desperate picture of a culture hurtling toward destruction out of the villainous race of his original fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, making them "human" but still quite alien.

This is the story of two groups of people, including characters readers will remember from the trilogy as The Good Guys™, locked in an endless cycle of hatred. More complex for the reader is that some of the vendettas are entirely justified.

Both sides openly espouse genocide as the only possible solution to their hate. Despite this grim sounding description, The Heart of What Was Lost is paced so swiftly that it does not mire itself in misery but throws you right in the middle of the story and hurtles you to the other side. Of other importance is the way there is less focus on dark gore and atrocities (many are implied or off-screen) but on the sad tragedy and glimmering hope in all this violence, the effect of the battles on characters shown more than the battles themselves. 

It's a Forever War for fantasy readers, a surprisingly relevant story that could easily apply to many real world conflicts told with care to character detail and pacing. It’s beautiful.

Due to this, it’s an easy recommend for fans of Williams and newcomers wanting an easy and short entry commitment to his works alike.

[sissensen]

The best book dedication eva (Tad Williams - Otherland).

[westrangecountry]

Hey, you! Want to be a writer? Read More.

I wish someone had told me this when I was a teen, but there really is one simple trick to improve your writing: 

Read and write, in continuous chaining circles. 

There is nothing more to it. I wasted allowance on How To Write books. Hours ticked away on Internet forums. This all had to help me, somehow. 

But learning how to write is easier than that: read more. Read fiction and non-fiction. Read the ones with the Roman names and the sad dead Russians. Read the pulps with the bent yellow covers, read women's magazines, the political blogs, and the ones with word bubbles. Read it all. 

Okay, maybe just telling you to read more is not enough. Maybe it’s not that simple, with “read more!” just summing up what people should really tell you. 

In reading and paying attention to what you read, you will learn narrative tricks, sentence structure, description, everything you could ever hope for and even plenty of things that make you scowl, turn away, avoid - but you need to pay attention. Just a little bit of attention, not enough to take you off of reading, but if something stands out to you, good or bad, stop right there and reread the page, then maybe - maybe - read it again. And again. 

Then, you move on. Eventually this will get more into your gut and your marrow, you will start to learn from every other thing you read. You’re not researching for a paper, you’re playing an instrument you have been practicing for years. That is what every author, Writer’s Digest article, and so on means when they say “If you want to write, read more” or “A good writer is a good reader.” (Note: not just a reader, but a good reader.) Reading is an art in-and-of-itself, or at least constructively reading is.

Becoming a “good” reader can take a long time. Me, I feel like I just “got” reading 1-2 years ago and I have been paying close attention for at least 4-5 years. 

The more time I spend working with words, the more I realize the importance of reading. Reading is, in its way, mental prep for writing.

Writing, your writing, is where you work through what you have read the day before. 

So: read more. 

[westrangecountry]

Amateur Writer Confessions: Structure

A personal review just for me, left out here in the cold in case it helps anyone.

For a long time, my novels lacked structure. I could string sentences together, describe vividly, and had some grand concepts, but my writing lacked that elusive concept: form. Houses of cards fell around me.

My first attempt during college left me with a series of events that happened, not a story. A house of cards. A second attempt left me with 120,000 sprawling words that needed a dumpster more than it needed an editor. Another house of cards, if only a slightly better built one. In both cases, what I produced showed structural issues so deep that editing would amount to scrapping all but a few chapters and starting from scratch. As the high from completing such a huge task faded, in the weeks that followed, awful truths sank in. 

Without narrative structure, the novels did not work as stories.

There was a fundamental problem with how I structured my longer work. I’m what Brandon Sanderson calls a "garden" writer, doing what Stephen King calls "by-the-seat-of-your-pants”: writing is more of an exploration to me. Outlines don’t interest me beyond maybe a page, the act of outlining only draining interest from the actual work by decreasing the sense of discovery from inventing situations, characters, details on a chapter-by-chapter basis.

A certain randomness is inherent in writing without a plan, but I needed to learn to rein in that randomness. Isn't that reining in creativity? I thought that. Isn't that putting yourself in a cage? I thought that, too. And it is, to an extent, but I found new types of creativity in my restraints. For my third attempt, I whittled down my story before I even started.

Let me be clear: I’m not advocating outlines. If you use them, fine, but I don’t think they’re necessary for all writers. No outlines and no in-depth plans even in my mind, but a firm focus on limits: 

Majority of the story is set in a single building and showing the reader outside locations happens when 100% necessary.  

Time span of several hours, barring anecdotal character flashbacks. 

One central character. Plentiful side characters, with their own mini-stories, but focus remains firmly on this single character. No multi-character arcs, no family saga. 

Avoid twists that I didn't plan for; if one came to mind while writing, I needed to think it over very carefully, reading previous chapters, and reassess both what I wrote and what I might write for the ending.

Anything introduced, be it a character flaw or a gun, must have a pay off. If it doesn’t, it gets deleted or dropped so I can edit it out in future drafts. Pay off like you’re in debt to the mob: all characters, even the smallest ones, build to a crescendo even if it’s a few lines of dialogue.

The plot I picked has limitations built into the storytelling. The single location, one character, etc. put together in a lean package makes it a stronger work than with multiple viewpoints or a vast scope.  

With those limitations in mind, I wrote for six months. After sitting on the result for two months, I don’t hate it. Scanning it for edits, there is nothing that needs a huge rewrite or would even make me consider scrapping the novel. Edits will always happen no matter how careful you are, but this is something new to me: structure and purpose.

[designislaw]

THE YAHOO CONUNDRUM: Kharak is Burning

One has to ask themselves, what does Yahoo even do anymore? They’re a search engine… that nobody uses due to Google’s supremacy over the web. They provide an e-mail service… that almost everyone has forgotten for the sake of GMail. They recently bought Tumblr… screwed around with blog listings before changing them back… and forced ads into the user feed. That the user base figured out how to hide on day one, to great relief. You go to Yahoo.com and it seems to be a generic news webzone, where “couple throws a wedding reception for $1.56” takes up way more space than a story on the possibility of an upcoming strike against Syria. One can’t really have any confidence in Yahoo! as a corporation, an artifact of the old dot-com boom clinging to relevancy in the era of startups popping up everywhere you look.

Amazingly enough, roughly 700 million people visit Yahoo! owned websites every month, with a net income of almost 4 billion last year. So, somewhere, somehow, there’s an audience for what Yahoo! brings to the internet, as non-controversial and non-threatening as that may be. Their income is primarily marketing services, mostly from search advertising. In other words, nothing of any real value to society. With Google having a cultural stranglehold over search engines, this model is sure to kill off Yahoo! sooner than later. 

Yet here we are, with bold Marissa Mayer taking the reigns over the old beast back in July of 2012. In May of this year, she led Yahoo! to buying out Tumblr for over a billion dollars, and the first real change this has had I’ve already mentioned - invasive ads that were soon hidden by the userbase. How happy do you think those ad buyers would be to discover their money was being essentially burned up by Mayer and Karp? Beyond that, Tumblr seems to be holding steady in their bizarre hip-with-the-kids approach to blogging. Not to forget Flickr so easily, which is still going strong under Yahoo’s leadership, as divided as the community may be about their decisions and redesigns. 

Outside of that, Mayer has been pushing heavy on mobile, buying out a number of startups with mobile related products, usually knock-offs of already established products like Vine, Pinterest, and Google Hangout. Yahoo! seems to thrive as The Redundancy Company, which would be great if they were competitive about it in some manner. For example, they released a fancy weather app for iOS. Which is weird, because iOS comes with a free, competent weather app installed on all compatible devices. But hey, knock yourself out.

As finances have continued to slide more and more, Marissa has been certainly running bearish, and while engagement rates have gone up, time will tell if this actually pays off in turning around the downward slide of Yahoo. One would argue though that what is the relevancy of Yahoo! in this day and age? They’re this bloated beast of corporate suits who managed to stay alive off a worthless business model and bought out everyone’s favorite blogging platform - they’re intimately uncool by design. 

Marissa seems to be trying to recreate Google’s monolithic presence at her personal tech-giant, offering similar services to products we’re already using across the web. It’s become a problem of who really gives a damn at this point? The name’s already been tarnished and forgotten over the past decades, and that idiotic fucking “yaaaahhhhooooo” yelp over oh so many of their commercials has driven more people to smash windows than the latest Penny Arcade faux-apology. Without a defined purpose, Yahoo! is certain to flounder about until the floor falls out from under them, as long as that may take as revenue continues to drop.

What’s even worse is that previously established platforms such as Yahoo! Sports have become nigh unreadable due to the overload of information crammed without any real rhyme or reason for anyone who would come to that site seeking curated sports news across a variety of fields. This is a mess! This certainly isn’t an easy task, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but this is really bleeding here, and it’s really unacceptable for someone trying to complete on Google and Apple’s level as tech monoliths.

So what is Mayer’s number one priority as CEO of a sinking ship at this point? Make a new logo, obviously! She rolls out 30 days of 30 new logos, a comically inept practice of rolling out rejects from the factory line and pretending it’s some sort of cultural event. This is the horrific cyberpunk dystopia Mayer wants to believe in - that the Internet will come together in adoration of rejected corporate logos, like moths to a flame. This is the problem of Mayer’s comical misunderstanding of the design process - you never show the rejects, especially if it turns out at least one of them is better than the final product. 

So really, Yahoo! spends a month trying to get the public hyped about a corporate logo, and it turns out their final choice and everything around it is a massively underwhelming exercise in design-by-committee that seems to imply Yahoo sells beauty products more than being a bloated tech giant. There’s a reason design firms and branding agencies get hired for this sort of work by tech companies - because tech companies usually lack the combined expertise to properly execute an effective logo, especially one that brings new life to a dying, uncool company like Yahoo. 

Here’s what the new Yahoo! logo is: a slightly modified Optima typeface, with a faux-3d bevel effect and unevenly kerned type. Listening to Mayer’s breakdown of the process, her and four other people cranked this out in a weekend - a horribly ineffective and inefficient method to redesign a corporate logo, leaving so much room for error and chances to miss the mark entirely. 

“I love brands, logos, color, design, and most of all, Adobe Illustrator,” Mayer claims. Yet any real designer will tell you that it’s not the tools that make the logo - it’s skills, and experience. “I’m not a pro, but I know enough to be dangerous.” Sarcastically, she intends, yet here we are, damage done. “I’m not a pro, but I know enough to be dangerous” doesn’t pass in an operating room, it doesn’t pass in a flooded basement, it doesn’t pass in a hostage situation, it doesn’t pass in a board room, but apparently it passes for a billion dollar corporation’s logo. 

If you’re not a pro, you hire a pro - it’s the sheer contempt for design as an industry that leads to shitshows like these, that design can be done by just anyone, that can be handled in house over a weekend like it’s no real effort. Then you wind up with a sub-par product, and after a month of trying to generate hype, everyone just groans and laughs at yet another idiotic publicity stunt that blows up right in your face. 

Right now, as Mayer tries and struggles to reinvent Yahoo’s image into an influential tech giant looming over all, their last priority right now is a new logo. What does Yahoo! even do? Keep an outdated search engine up and running? Run a bad mainstream news portal? Buy up cool startups and try to ruin them? In the public eye, Yahoo! is seen more as a bother - an uncool, balding uncle from a different time trying to butt in on the neighborhood pickup game of hoops. 

That’s why this logo has been lambasted so hard - because Yahoo’s trying so damn hard to be “hip,” and relevant, forcing their way into the cultural narrative of tech through money, and weekend rebrands and publicity stunts like rolling out rejected, no-effort type treatments. Then you roll out a bad fuckaround of Optima, throw on a faux-3d chisel effect, don’t bother to properly kern, and then wrap it up in this fucking thing?

For an intern, Max did alright work, but they’re fucking interns for a reason, you know?! It’s the assumed, semi-religious worship aesthetic of a Grand Theft Auto parody explaining the “logo blueprint” - similar to that internal Pepsi document titled “BREATHTAKING Design Strategy” that equated unhealthy sugar water with society’s future innovations. 

Your logo isn’t a fucking religious declaration. Maybe it is for you, and the people in your company, but for the vast majority of society it’s just yet another meaningless piece of visual noise in an onslaught of cultural worthlessness. It’s not Moses bringing down the Ten Commandments or parting the waves, it’s going to be forgotten in a week, so you might as well not even bother trying to force publicity that is only going to blow up in one’s face - and if you’re going to hack together a logo, at least spend a little more time than chopping up Optima because “the human form has no straight lines." 

We’re in a really creepy space, especially the advertising industry, where corporations are demanding more than just profit, but worship from their consumer. From marketers obsessing over "brand engagement” to CEOs prioritizing logo debuts over making a company relevant to the public again, there’s a bizarre cyberpunk theology rising among us. As designers and other professions trapped within the system try to thrive among it, we start to lose touch with the people who our work is truly for - the everyday Jane (or Joe) trying to navigate society and make informed purchasing decisions, whether that be in money, time, or a combination of the two. 

Yahoo! as a company isn’t going to survive with a new logo, it won’t survive buying up a bunch of startups and shoving advertising in them, and it certainly won’t thrive off it’s dying revenue model. I feel for Mayer, who has an upward climb ahead of her if she truly seeks to make Yahoo! have a different impression on society that isn’t as a bloated, outdated corporation that seems to be incapable of anything but trespassing on communities such as Tumblr. There isn’t an easy way out and I wish her the best, but there seems to be no real signs of life left in the beast.

Design is Law is an independently run joint. If you enjoy my writing, please consider throwing a few bucks in the tip jar.

[westrangecountry]

Writing: Creative Deadlines vs. Creative Walls

When it comes to the fan community that has sprung up around films, especially those involving comic book characters, there is a lot of concern about shoots going too long or shoots that are crammed into short schedules. Marvel’s Ant-Man is a recent such example. 

On a smaller scale, it happens in the book fan communities. “The publisher rushed her, this one can’t be good.” Or “He’s taking too long, it’ll be bad.” But the truth is that either situation can produce a masterpiece - or total crap. Here’s why. 

To put it simply, being fully inspired and rushing to meet a deadline can work out fine. Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark is the result of an infamously short shooting schedule, with the film completed 12 days ahead of time (73 days total). On his previous film, 1941, Spielberg went over schedule and had plenty of time and money, but let’s just say that one is recalled as a classic of film and the other is not really remembered at all. For a book example, the general view of George R.R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows is lukewarm and that required 5 years of writing, with an entire draft of multiple hundreds of pages tossed into the waste bin due to not meeting Martin’s standards.

Freedom of time and/or money can make you creatively stagnant. You’ll run through the same problems and concepts and ideas again and again, second guessing choices that might have worked out better, and in effect going in circles instead of at least picking somewhere to go. 

The most vivid example in history is a video game: Duke Nukem Forever. 15 years to create a sequel to a raunchy and violent first person shooter. 15 years. The freedom handed the developers actually killed them, creatively. 

On the other hand, rushing into things can end up with sloppy writing and typos littering every page. Or missing shots, in a film, or bugs, in a game. 

Personally, I think that what determines which result you get comes down to this: are you rushing with passion or are you rushing with no goals and an increasing bewilderment?; are you taking your time and fine-tuning with detail, like Tolkien writing appendices for a decade before even finishing Lord of the Rings, or are you spinning in circles over narrative issues that may not even exist outside of your head?

An incredibly varying set of situations and chances rule the outcome. That is not what most writing books want to teach and it is probably even less what you want to hear, but that’s the truth as I see it. You can write a masterpiece in a month or 15 years; you can spend 5 years going nowhere on a middling book or a few weeks tossing out garbage words. There is no rule on time=good/bad.

It’s completely down to luck, really.

[fatal-potato]

Remember when Iwata spent three weeks alongside the Melee team debugging the gameplay so they could make their deadlines

Remember when Iwata cut his pay when the Wii U was losing fiscally to make sure nobody on his team had to suffer on behalf of those losses, because he believed the system couldn’t make it without everyone’s participation

Remember when he ported Pokemon Stadium’s battle system in a week without reference sheets

Remember when he originally helped work on Mother and basically helped the series exist

Remember when he compressed Pokemon Gold and Silver to even less than half its original size to fit in Kanto, something the original dev team didn’t even think was something they were gonna do or even could do themselves

Remember all those goofy montages he went out of his way to make fun of himself for so we could laugh

Remember how he refused to let Nintendo become active on the mobile market, effectively having made the company truer to core principles of videogames than most

Remember how people actually hated him and how he had to return from work tired every night probably having to keep this in mind

He was only 55

We lost someone legit

We’ll never forget you Iwata

[westrangecountry]

The fake given life: Metal Gear Solid (1998)

The world presented in Metal Gear Solid (1998) is not real. Beyond the obvious - it is a two-disc game developed for the Sony Playstation - it is not a story that strives for realism. Yet at the time, it ranked among the most “real” story experiences in gaming. There is a simple reason for that.

No matter how outrageous the events of the game (cyborg ninjas, presidents ordering terrorist attacks on American targets for nebulous reasons, clone brothers, and an anime-loving sidekick), it is grounded in details. Some are logical, some are inane. 

Being tortured while shirtless in the middle of Alaska results in the player character, Snake, catching a cold. The cold adds to the gameplay by making Snake sneeze when around enemies, giving player feedback for a story choice: you only catch this cold if you give up during the torture, essentially sentencing one of the supporting characters to death. It’s a storytelling and gameplay sucker punch, basically. 

To fight a helicopter boss, a stereo TV allows you to hear its flight patterns and track it via audio. With a mono TV, your support crew knocks you for owning old tech before reassuring you that they believe you can do it anyway.

The nerd friend character, Hal “Otacon” Emmerich, loving anime, complete with his intro cutscene featuring footage of giant robot battles, is a weird but still realistic touch: in a time when games featured cutouts of Arnold and types, here is a realistic sheltered scientist type. Not exactly heroic, whiny, and obsessed with Japan. 

Set on a base that is half-Aliens, half-surrealism, exposed pipes and rotting concrete covered in snow collided with secret underground hangars with eerie zen-music. The clash of styles meshed: the normalcy of the gray-and-blue offices and bunkers of Shadow Moses is what people think of when they think of a post-Cold War military structure, but the Psycho Mantis room and Rex Hangar are like the conspiracy fueled rumors online about lizard aliens. Shadow Moses is realism mixed with tin foil fetish.

The revelation that the player character is fighting an evil twin - an age old story beat that the game helpfully points out is Biblical like Able and Cain - is anchored with what some might call an unneeded tangent that twists the twist even further. Featuring actual documentary footage of the Gulf War instead of the typical game cutscene, real life poisonings from chemical rounds are linked to the idea of gene therapy. The same live action footage is employed when the game talks about nuclear weapons and the world post-Cold War, lending a bizarre credibility to proceedings.

At the time of Splinter Cell, plenty of people in the gaming community wished Metal Gear to resemble Sam Fisher’s (comparatively) more realistic adventures, but that point of view misses what Metal Gear is - and is strongest for - entirely: an old-fashioned action thriller given life by its very weirdness. While Sam Fisher and all the other Tom Clancy type game leads from 1998-2002 are more realistic than Solid Snake (or Raiden), they are not actual characters - Snake is, despite being the only of the set to engage in super heroic action backflips and bullet dodges.

It is this strangeness that adds humanity to Metal Gear: few other action thrillers in any medium would pause to have the gruff supportive colonel explain how he cheated on a family member and his career is actually in the drain due to personal stress; few video games aiming to tell a serious story would want the player to be able to run around with a cardboard box on their head, let alone allow a wolf pup to urinate on the box and camouflage your scent from other wolves. (Another strange, but “realistic” detail.) 

Call it post-modernist, if you want. To me, it brings to mind how Marvel revolutionized comics in the early 60s, bringing a very pulp series of characters with outlandish origins and psychedelic Jack Kirby visuals to life in real world cities with real world problems and plenty of pathos. The current trend in literature is towards the same kind of extraneous detail (Don Delillio) and oddity (Thomas Pynchon). The game holds up today, and at the year of release was downright revolutionary. The time I spent playing other games in the decade plus after Metal Gear Solid’s release has only driven home how much the industry owes to this one game from 1998.

[westrangecountry]

No one has seen Bond’s Quantum of Solace quite like I have

Valentine’s Day, 2010. Thanks to my roommate, I woke up in my bed with swine flu. He had left earlier that day, “quarantined” to his house. The room was empty and dark. Midnight-going-on-morning. 

Through the lone window overlooking our quad, music rose from the campus dining hall, where a Valentine’s Day dance lit my glass and shook it with music. A quick vomit in the 1960s sink hanging out of the wall confirmed it: sleep was a stranger tonight.

I popped in a Netflix disc. I watched Quantum of Solace. It was the most surreal experience of my life.

Car - nice, fast, sleek. Gun. Daniel Craig sneering. Other guns shoved at the camera. Glass exploding? Now running. The score weaving in, weaving out. 

When people say Michael Bay shoots chaotic, nauseous scenes, this is what they really mean. By the 30 minute mark, I had migrated to the floor. The carpet was from the 80s, or the 90s at the latest, with the musk of an old house that weathered too much rain. 

Flat on my back, a headache stormed and my stomach dropped out. At one point, I trembled with sweat, coated in it, the coils in the radiator rattling. Each shot of the film hurt my eyes. Images unreeled, mad libs from action movie history mixed with the music shaking my window glass. 

An eye over an opera opening up. More running, a chase through the opera crowd. Bang bang gunshots. Cottoneye Joe. 

I finished the film by dragging myself, on hands and knees, and vomiting into the sink. This is not an angry internet person hyperbolic allegory for the movie I watched, this is how I actually ended Quantum of Solace: covered in my own vomit. If you want to take that as a review, go ahead, but you’ll never watch the film quite like I did.