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30 Days of Night

Books, Reviews, RIG: Monsters 8 Responses »

Sep 232013

Let’s take a look at the graphic novel 30 Days of Night, written by Steve Niles and illustrated by Ben Templesmith. By now you’ve probably come to expect my insanity, so I’ll get it out of the way early. Instead of attempting a Moarte imitation and filling this review with maniacal laughter, I’ll just tell you that I first heard of 30 Days of Night last October, when it appeared on Longbox of the Damned. It’s been almost a year since then, so all I remembered was the general premise of vampires attacking an Alaskan town during polar night and that an important vampire guy showed up to tell the others what idiots they were. I’m glad I didn’t remember more, because I re-watched the review just a moment ago, and it covers the entire plot. But I knew Moarte/Linkara/Lewis Lovhaug liked the comic, so I had high hopes. And anyone who knows how much time I’ve spent trying to figure out how sun-fearing vampires would fare in space shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the story’s premise grabbed my attention right away. Vampires and polar night? All right!

Once again, there will be spoilers in this post.

I’m not a big reader of graphic novels. 30 Days of Night is only the fourth graphic novel to find a place on my bookshelf. Therefore, my inexperience could be to blame here, but the art style made it kind of hard for me to follow this one. There were entire panels that forced me to use context clues from the dialogue and surrounding panels to figure out just what had happened. (For example, the ending. I read it four or five times before I realized that there was a scene break between the pages. Until then, it seemed to me like the sun rose two minutes after they said it would rise in a couple of days.)

Animorphs was my childhood

I will praise the art for the teeth. It did a good job with teeth. They did a better job of communicating the danger of the vampires for me than the stylized sprays of blood did. But still, there were several times when the vampires’ teeth and crazy tongues (what was up with that?) reminded me of Taxxons instead of vampires. That was pretty weird, but all right. I’m not overly picky about vampires. This graphic novel’s super-strong, nearly-indestructible, deadly, evil variant was fine, although they left me with some confusion. They were a step up from the zombie-like vampires of I Am Legend, with individual personalities and the ability to plan and reason. Marlow’s plan is well thought out, even if he didn’t consider the long-term consequences. Vicente, who is aware of the consequences, comes up with a new plan to fix things. So they’re pretty smart and could possibly pass as humans, although I assume their unique font means their voices are strange. But for all that, they seem pretty one-dimensional. They’re vampires, humans are food, done. We don’t get much insight into them beyond that. I was fine with that, especially when one of the survivors turns into a vampire from a scratch (these vampires need to take care to make sure they don’t turn their victims, because this sort of vampirism spreads very easily) and immediately goes into attack mode. As soon as he becomes a vampire, he’s an enemy. That explained a lot to me–even if the vampires could think and had personalities, the people they once were ceased to exist the moment they turned. Then Eben launched his final plan to stop the vampires, and my theory died.

Eben uses vampire blood to infect himself, in the hopes that it will make him strong enough to drive the vampires away. He gets the crazy vampire font for his dialogue and becomes hungry for blood, but he runs from his wife so he won’t hurt her and goes to fight Vicente. He’s a vampire, but he’s still Eben. So what was with the other guy’s instantaneous switch to evil? Does Eben just have awesome willpower? Was it the way he was infected? Did a panel explain it and I missed it? I thought when he and Vicente were arguing about whether being a vampire is great or horrible, they were going to clear this up for me, but they didn’t.

Also, am I crazy, or did most of the vampires look like what would happen if Nosferatu was about mobsters?

On second thought, maybe I am crazy.

Despite my confusion, I did think the vampires were good monsters. They were dangerous, they spent most of the book killing people, and like I said, I liked the teeth. And even if they were a bit one-dimensional, there were enough differences between them to make them actual characters. When Vicente arrives, and the other vampires are clapping while he’s wondering how they could all be such idiots, I laughed. They were interesting. I just would have liked to know more about them.

And that isn’t confined to just the vampires. I didn’t feel like I knew any of the human characters, either. I rooted for them because they were the humans, but that’s it. Most of the survivors just seemed like they were there to be victims, and even the main characters, Eben and Stella, weren’t much to me beyond named good guys with a chance at success. I’d chalk it up to my unfamiliarity with graphic novels, but other graphic novel characters have come to life as characters for me.

I liked 30 Days of Night. It’s earned its spot in my tiny graphic novel collection. I just didn’t like it as much as I wanted to.

Rawhead Rex and several strange connections

Books, Reviews, RIG: Monsters 8 Responses »

Sep 162013

This week we’ll take a look at “Rawhead Rex,” a short story by Clive Barker. I’d never read anything by him before, despite a friend telling me I should. I filed the recommendation away and more or less forgot about it. The closest I got was when I watched the first few videos of a Let’s Play of Clive Barker’s Undying. So I didn’t really know what to expect from this story, but as long as the monster didn’t have eight legs, I wasn’t too worried.

I should mention that I’m not a big fan of visceral horror, and “Rawhead Rex” was filled with blood, people being eaten, and similar gory moments. But I’m not going to complain about that. It worked for the story and made Rawhead a gruesome, serious threat. If Rawhead comes after you, it’s probably over. What can you do against a force like that? (My suggestion: count to zero, then scream and run away.)

Once again, to give fair warning to anyone who reads this before reading the story, there will be spoilers in this post.

When characters in fiction come across a door that’s been welded shut, a box that won’t open, an insanely strong prison, or in this case, a boulder that doesn’t want to budge, you can usually count on two things. First, they’ll find a way to force their way in. Second, bad things will result. As soon as Thomas Garrow came across a massive boulder in a field his family never used, and decided to get rid of it no matter how ridiculously hard it was to remove, his fate was sealed.

This story worked for me, especially since it had several of the elements that make demons my favorite monsters. If Rawhead wasn’t exactly a demon, he was still a demon-like monster, sealed away years ago and accidentally released by humanity, and ultimately defeated by a force of good. He even shows signs of being able to possess people, or at least exert considerable influence over them. I’ll resist the urge to veer off-topic and babble like a lunatic about Ray Bradbury, but I consider Rawhead to be demon-like in the same way that Mr. Dark and Mr. Cooger from Something Wicked This Ways Comes are demon-like–forces of evil with undeniable similarities to traditional devil portrayals, but who don’t necessarily fit the role in a Christian sense [Mr. Dark mocks the idea that the Bible could harm him, and Rawhead is delighted to realize that “the true power, the only power that could defeat him, was apparently gone: lost beyond recall, its place usurped by a virgin shepherd” (Barker 390).]

You could say “Rawhead Rex” subverts religious ideas because of that, but Rawhead was terrified of and repelled by a statue of (arguably) a goddess, which had been hidden in the church.

When I first read it, I thought Rawhead was an invention of Barker’s, but apparently he’s a variation on a mythological bogeyman-like figure that eats children who misbehave. (I looked it up because Rawhead reminded me of a bloodier, more violent version of the troll in Ernest Scared Stupid. The troll was sealed away years previously, goes on a rampage when it’s released, and targets children. The similarities end there.)

While Rawhead’s actions–murdering people, eating children, etc.–and appearance make him a brute force sort of monster, he gets point of view sections. His thoughts mainly revolve around eating people and claiming his position as King (hence the “Rex” in the title), but there was something disturbingly childlike about his confusion over technology such as cars. Rather than make his less monstrous, his fears made him even creepier. He knows what can harm him and what can’t. He is capable of learning, as seen when the crashed car teaches him “a new and lethal lesson” (383) and he later uses petrol as a weapon.

Rawhead’s downfall

Rawhead’s downfall is female fertility, or the creation of life, which is an unusual weakness…but we’re dealing with a demon here, so it works. I liked the way Barker handled it. It didn’t come out of nowhere, but was foreshadowed quite early on, when Rawhead was afraid to touch a woman having her period. In the end, one of the characters finds a Venus statue hidden in the church, and the sight of it paralyzes Rawhead with fear. From the description, the statue is not the Roman goddess Venus, but a prehistoric figurine similar to Venus of Willendorf (pictured).

All in all, I enjoyed “Rawhead Rex” (and look at all the things it gave me excuses to reference). With so many characters, many of whom die partway through the story, it’s hard to pull out one as the protagonist. I like to think it’s Reverend Coot. Sure, Ron got the statue and delivered the killing blow to Rawhead, but he only found it because Coot clung onto life long enough to tell him the altar was the key. But of course I’d choose a good-hearted Reverend as the protagonist in a demon story. Don’t tell me you didn’t see that one coming.

Works Cited

Barker, Clive. “Rawhead Rex.” 1984. Books of Blood: Vols 1-3. New York: Berkley, 1998. 362-407. Print.

Arachnophobia + Breeding Ground = ?

Books, Reviews, RIG: Monsters 8 Responses »

Sep 092013

Back in July, my books for the semester arrived, and I looked at the cover of Sarah Pinborough’s Breeding Ground with a sinking feeling. Then I read the description on the back. I reached the line about the “spidery nightmares.” I reacted as calmly as you might expect from someone with arachnophobia.

I hid the book beneath the rest and pretended it didn’t exist until I saw its name on the schedule and realized I’d have to face it.

The first few chapters were as creepy as I feared, and that was before the widows (that is, the horrible spider monsters, as I thought of them) were born. Chloe’s mutations and changes as the widow grew inside of her, all witnessed by her horrified boyfriend Matt, were freaky as heck. I thought it would have benefited from a little more subtlety, rather than spiraling out of control as quickly as it did, but that’s just my preference. It was scary, it was creepy, and it set me up to expect my time with this book to be as horrible as I feared when I first read its description.

But by the time I finished Breeding Ground, I did not hide in the corner and sob. My reaction was, “Eh.” I can’t explain why without getting into some spoilers, so reader beware!

This is a horror book, so let’s start with the horror. The first few chapters were brilliant in that regard. Near the end, I also found it very creepy and disturbing. That leaves about 200 pages in between that didn’t do it for me at all.

Part of the problem was Matt. I didn’t feel anything for him. To me, his only function was to show the story through his eyes. That kind of narrator can work for me, especially in horror, but there wasn’t enough horror in the middle of the book for that to work. I tried to focus on the survivors and their interactions, but he came across to me as too bland. I wasn’t very attached to any of the other characters, either–except possibly to Jane, but that’s because I kept drawing comparisons to a different apocalyptic survival story. Her role as a little girl in the group of survivors reminded me of Clementine, and Telltale’s take on The Walking Dead was far better at making me attached to characters than this book was.

And why was everyone oblivious to the impending Apocalypse? Matt noticed the changes in Chloe, but in no one else, and the book suggests that everyone was like that–aware of an issue with their immediate loved ones, but that’s it. Wouldn’t people be more likely to notice half the town showing the same weird symptoms? Oh, right, the doctors knew. They just didn’t do anything. In face of a pandemic, the world’s doctors decided to “wait and see” (Pinborough 25). What??

Then there was the romance. Katie arrived in the story, and immediately Matt “tried not to notice how pretty she was” (86), which signaled the start of his romantic goals for a good portion of the book. I have no problem with romance in novels. I try to add some myself. And I’ve seen far worse cases than this–one book shoehorned in romance so badly that when the characters started kissing, I flipped back to see if I had somehow skipped a few pages–but the immediacy jarred me. Even Robert Neville had more justification than this. Matt flees his mutated girlfriend, learns that women everywhere became breeders for the widows, and is instantly attracted to the first woman he sees? Hey, maybe it would work that way. I haven’t been in that position, so I can’t say for sure. But it felt too soon to me, and in general, his flirting and romantic concerns (accompanied by the occasional flicker of guilt that he didn’t feel more guilty) in the middle of the Apocalypse bugged me. Their eventual sex scene read like it got shuffled in from a different book–particularly since the prologue set the book up as an apocalyptic log for other survivors to have a record of events. Matt acknowledged the reader again in that section and added some justifications for his actions, so I can’t pretend the author forgot the premise, which just leaves me with…why?

Beyond those, there were just some things that threw me out of the reading. For example, the deaf survivor, Rebecca, can read lips. The narration mentioned this…three pages after Matt talked to her out loud and she wrote her replies. I probably should have assumed lip-reading, but instead I stopped in confusion and wondered how she could hear him. At one point in the book, I encountered three different tenses in the same sentence. I’m still not sure exactly what that was about. And then there’s an issue that came up with I Am Legend as well…

Science.

Although the prologue of Breeding Ground offers many possibilities as to what caused the widows, a scientist reveals late in the book that the most probable cause is genetically modified food. It’s actually a cool explanation: he suggests that after the creation of genetic hybrids, modifications to make plants and animals larger, and the development of insect-repellent plants, “a little bit of the experiment floats away on the wind, meets up with a little bit of another experiment, and then who knows what could happen” (220). What could happen, apparently, is giant spider creatures that breed inside humans.

My willing suspension of disbelief can go pretty far, and I’ve heard enough about companies like Monsanto to accept this as a cool idea. Pinborough took an existing issue with real concerns and controversies, and stretched it beyond the realms of possibility (we hope) for a horror story. That’s a great way to do horror! Genetically modified food goes horribly wrong and creates telepathic spider monsters? All right, I’ll go with that! The problem is that it raised too many questions. Why wasn’t this foreshadowed earlier, or at least hinted at (aside from the prologue)? I love it when horror has a mystery to piece together, but this had no pieces, just a sudden revelation. How did this genetic mutation affect people? Why did it only affect women? Why did it affect almost all the world’s women at exactly the same time? Why were other women affected later? How did it evolve to affect men? And why does the blood of deaf people stop it?

I have one final complaint. In an echo of Robert Neville’s thoughts in I Am Legend, near the end of Breeding Ground, Matt realizes that “a new order had taken hold and our old laws no longer applied” (315). They let Nigel die in agony from his widow bite, instead of giving him a quick death, as punishment for the horrible things he did. I could debate the morality of their actions, but instead I’m going to address the practicality. What does that have to do with the “new order”? It’s meant to imply a coldhearted, ruthless law necessary for their new existence, but that has nothing to do with survival unless it’s meant as a message to Nigel’s cronies–and since they let him die from something that would kill him anyway, instead of killing him, I’m not sure it works as that sort of message. And I’m sure Nigel would have argued that he was the one enforcing the laws of a ruthless, necessary new order. But I’m being picky now, so I’ll stop.

There were parts of this book I really did like and there were parts I found genuinely scary. I never felt like throwing it against the wall. It was interesting enough for me to keep turning the pages, despite my complaints, but not much more. The sequel apparently has crack addict spider monsters, which sounds bizarre enough to make me curious, but I think I’ll pass. In the end, Arachnophobia + Breeding Ground = “Eh.”

Works Cited

Pinborough, Sarah. Breeding Ground. New York: Dorchester, 2006. Print.

Update: Every time I think about this book now, I don’t think about the creepy spider monsters but about Linkara’s “Of course! Don’t you know anything about science?!” clip.

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