Book Review: We Sold Our Souls

So back in 2016 I happened across a copy of Grady Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism in my local book store and after reading it was delighted to find a new voice in the horror genre that felt like a bridge between YA horror and the adult stuff.

A few months later I tried his first book Horrorstor and although I didn't like it as much, I loved the layout and design of the book and there were some really great bits in it that I saw coming more together with My Best Friend's Exorcism.

Finally, last year I read his non-fiction work Paperbacks from Hell and I have to say it ranks quite high in my favourite non-fiction about the horror genre.

So last weekend when a copy of his latest, We Sold Our Souls came into my local library I was thrilled to dig right in. And three days and 330 pages later - I absolutely loved it.

The book follows a has-been heavy metal guitarist named Kris who begins the book in a dead-end job in a small town, and on a quick side-note, I was thrilled the lead of this story was a woman in her mid-forties, rather than a nineteen year old kid - I'm always happy to read coming of age stories, but shake it up a little people!

The story moves from small town nightmare to the truly epic and does it with a great love of the music it glorifies. It bounces from humour to terror to gross-out horror and back again, and honestly, I simply couldn't put it down.

Bookmonkey vs. the Hoard: Post 2 - Deathgasm

I begin my attack on the Hoard by grabbing my next-to-most recent catch, a 2015 New Zealand Coming of Age Demonic Horror Comedy.

Ok, I'll be the first to admit this movie was not a hard sell for me - I've been a long-time fan of the horror genre, I'm a big fan of New Zealand Cinema, and the Heavy Metal theme to the film directly connects me to my teen years (ok, it actually connects me to the cool kids I spent my teen years wishing I could hang out with while I spent all of my time reading).

The 2015 film Deathgasm follows Brodie, a young metalhead who has recently moved in with his aunt and uncle, as he starts over as a new kid in school, making friends and even starting a band. Then he maybe sort of summons a demon, and things start to go very bad...

The film works in many ways like last year's Scouts Guide to the Apocalypse, four young men (and a young woman) end up fighting their way through a town in some pretty gruesome ways, while trying to save the world. The film strongly connected with my inner teen, and actually did a pretty great job of describing the appeal of metal music to the uninitiated.

The film was produced after winning the 2013 Make My Horror Movie contest in New Zealand, and although it has some weaknesses to it, the film is so filled with high energy and obvious love of the genre, that it's well worth a watch for horror fans.

In the end, although it's not a film I'll end up keeping, it was a lot of fun, and definitely has me looking forward to rewatching it's Canadian equivalent, Todd and the Book of Pure Evil.

Book Review: Lyonesse II

About twenty pages into Jack Vance's Lyonesse II: The Green Pearl, I started thinking that the book would end up an awful lot like the 1981 film Heavy Metal.  Both feature a mystical sphere of evil, which corrupts those who use it, and in the earliest chapter of Vance's follow-up to to his wonderful Lyonesse I: Suldrun's Garden the story does actually follow the set up of Heavy Metal to a large degree - person gets the pearl, pearl corrupts them, someone else kills them and takes the pearl, repeat.

What I'm really loving best about Vance's stuff however, is the fact that he starts with a relatively simple fantasy concept (magic item), and then inserts it into his larger world, showing how the various wizards, nobles and even common men of his world are affected by the item and deal with its potential for corruption.

Like the first book in the series, the story plays with high fantasy concepts as well as fairy tale concepts and blends them together into a really intriguing story, one that I'm definitely planning to complete with the award-winning conclusion to the trilogy, Lyonesse III: Maduac, which I'll be reading next month.

Really neat stuff.

Also a quick side note - the knight on a giant cat image shown on the cover is representative of some stuff that happens in the book, you just have to wait a while for it to show up.

Game Review: Brütal Legend

This morning I finished my first game for the Playstation 3: Brütal Legend. And although I already posted about the main character in one of my recent Genre Character of the Week posts, I felt the game itself deserved a review.

First of all, here's what I loved about the game - the music, the humour, and the view. The game features 107 tracks from 75 different Heavy Metal bands, all the original bands doing their own music. This alone was one of the strongest features of the game as I loved being able to switch between songs throughout and the music added a really fun dimension to the game (which is inspired by Heavy Metal lyrics, imagery, and album covers). Secondly the game had a great sense of humour, adding a fun dimension to an otherwise standard action game (it sort of felt like Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver to me, but instead of being filled with grim intensity, enjoyed poking fun at itself.) Finally, the graphics are just freaking amazing - speaking as someone who has never played a PS3 game before this one, I cannot stop commenting on how beautiful this game looks.

The negatives can mostly be tracked back to my inexperience with more recent games: in later levels of the game you end up playing strategist in that you send out squads of your men to attack different armies in real-time, requiring a skill-set I don't have a great grasp of yet. There were a few glitches, but overall I loved how smooth the gameplay felt.

For the $20 I spent on this game, I loved it - it kept me busy for a months worth of weekends, and it's open-world concept (wherein you can follow the main mission, side missions, or explore as you like), allowed me to have a really big sense of control throughout.

Like Jack Black says in the opening of the game, "This is so epic, it won't just blow your mind, It'll blow your soul."