Beelzebub's library

  The Void starts with a bang. It instantly sets up a few mysteries and it doesn’t believe in not showing its hand. Surprisingly this works out pretty well. By establishing the eldritch horror off the bat, it creates stakes, it ups the tension, it deepens the mystery, and it creates a paranoid atmosphere.             A police officer, a nurse, a high school intern, a knocked up teenager, her grandfather, a drug addict, and a couple of grizzled hunters become trapped within a remote hospital, surrounded by a murderous cult and the semi-undead monstrosities they’ve summoned from, you guessed it, le void. It reminds me immediately of The Mist, by Stephen King. But one of the things this movie is good at doing is subverting expectations. While we do spend time trying to figure out what is going on and tensions rising between the characters, the movie does not dwell solely...

BE ADVISED! Along with containing minor spoilers, this review will be less about the book itself and more about the series of All The Wrong Questions and what it accomplishes and what it fails.  When I was around twelve or thirteen I first picked up “Who could that be at this hour?” It instantly captured my imagination with its air of intrigue and fascinating, semi-surreal setting. I grew up with the previous serious in the Lemony Snicketverse, “A Series of Unfortunate Events” and I hadn’t yet discovered my love of noir films so many of the tropes at play were initially lost on me. Looking back, older and more mature, I can see the seams. Already in the first book of a series of four, I can see the moments where the story lags. Having read all four books, I can see that while Handler is a master of delivering a powerful and clever satire, he doesn’t know how to break his own routines. It’s less noticeable in the first book than it is in later entries, but we are alrea...

  Soupy Leaves Home, is a classic historical adventure. I used to listen to books that were like this graphic novel on book on tape all the time. As children, I and my siblings loved learning about how people lived back in the olden times, and the various hijinks they experienced. This book is a little more adult than what we might listen to, but I don’t think it’s any more disturbing than To Kill A Mockingbird.             The story is about a teenage girl, who adopts the term Soupy after disguising herself as a man and leaving her abusive father and helpless aunt, to become a hobo. She befriends a kind, wise old man named Remy, who teaches her how to survive a life on the run.             The narrative is enjoyable, with a lot of introspection and character building moments. The characters of Remy and the other...

(I like this cover a lot)   When my family and I were driving down from the suburbs in South Carolina to a Fort in Florida. It was a long drive, with lots of traffic and continuous driving. We listened to “The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish” and “The Wolves in the Walls” and “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” and a couple other short stories on tape. But, the two books we listened to the most were M.T. Anderson’s first two entries in the Pals In Perils , “Whales on Stilts” and “The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen” (We’ll cover that one later).             I loved both of those books, although I didn’t get to continue the series until much later. Today we’re going to talk about Whales on Stilts, an adventure-sci-fi-throwback-meta-spy children’s book. These books are amazing. The main characters, Lily (the shy girl), Katie (the less shy girl), and the delightful Jasper Dash, have a ne...