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...