History can be fun

ASSASSINATION! is several things. It's mesmerizing, educational, colorful, simple, fun, imaginative and unputdownable. 

When Feelings Are Gross

Sometimes my desire to read trash is so strong it leads me down a path that is either good, bad or just plain awful. More often than not that path ends in bad and at times just plain awful. I have no clue as to what on earth possessed me to read Endless Love. One moment I'm reading a good book and then suddenly I think to myself "Hey, why not read Endless Love? It's been on your list of books to read since forever."  I should have heeded the warning sign that this book was going to be a puddle of sticky dog doo after reading a piece on how Scott Spencer feels his novel is beyond reproach and that both film adaptations were pieces of trash that missed the point. Please, bitch, please. Mr. Spencer needs to have several seats because his novel is nothing more than a self indulgent love letter to the art of stalking and to its practitioners. 

Our stalker, David, tells us his tale of woe, of how he was brought into the bosom of the Butterfield family then so coldly discarded, actually he was sent to banned camp for thirty days, but I guess thirty days in the life of a horny teenaged boy is a lifetime. David loves the Butterfields, he loves mama Butterfield, poppa Butterfield, older brother Butterfield and little brother Butterfield, but mainly he loves Jade Butterfield. He loves Jade Butterfield with a fiery passion, a passion so strong the two teens create their own little world and have marathon sex sessions, David can stay hard for hours on end as he tells it. Because of these every night all night long sex sessions, delicate snowflake Jade isn't getting enough sleep. Poppa Butterfield tells David to get lost for at least thirty days, well David thinks so much with his penis he gets the brilliant idea to start a fire so the family will have to leave the house and then be forced to talk to him.  Too bad he choses the very night the Butterfield family decided to trip balls together. The Butterfield parents are very permissive open minded parents of the late sixties, they allow their daughter to have sex in the house with her nearly live in boyfriend, they smoke marijuana and drop acid together all the while taking in a collection of freaks and granola munchers to gawk at and possibly learn from, or something "progressive" and "enlightened" like that. 

Like the whinging self involved moron that he is, David readily confesses to his crime in a bid for redemption. Instead of redemption, he gets institutionalized. Thus begins his incessant crying and moaning and ruminating thoughts about the Butterfields, Jade, his sex life with Jade and his need to belong to the Butterfield family. Poor David never knew that a family could be so close and loving because his parents, mainly his mother, are self possessed cold ex communists. They may have quit the party, but the party never quit them.

Upon his release from the hospital David only has one thought and that's to find his letters to and from Jade. Day and night and night day this all he thinks about. When he finally gets a job enrolls in college and gets his own apartment he then only thinks about finding the Butterfield family. He searches in every phonebook in the country for Butterfields until he finds one then he skips parole to visit mama Butterfield. Mama Butterfield has divorced poppa Butterfield and embraced her inner cougar. She tells David that everyone in the family thinks that they were lovers so why not prove them all right? Of course he rejects her advances because he's saving himself for Jade. During his stay in mama Butterfield's city, poppa Butterfield sees David crossing the street, this makes poppa run after him causing him to be hit by a car. Somehow this is David's fault, I don't know how that is, but later in the story the blame is put squarely on his shoulders even though poppa Butterfield was crossing against traffic in order to get his hands onto David.

What follows is a reunion with the Butterfields to mourn their fallen patriarch, David finally meets up with Jade and then a long very detailed blood drenched fuck fest takes place. Reunited and it feels so good then secrets are revealed and then it all falls apart then an arrest is made and then punishment resumes. After years of sexual fidelity David decides that sexual healing is what he needs after learning that Jade has married some French guy. 

This story is not romantic, it's creepy and gross. David is a creep, the Butterfield parents are just awful. What kind of parents let their children drop acid with them and let their underage daughter have sex with her underage boyfriend in their home? I don't care if this took place in the late sixties, bad parenting is bad parenting. David alludes to some kind of inappropriate incesty type relationship between Jade and her older brother Keith, their mother Anne alludes to the fact that her husband Hugh may have had some incestuous feelings for Jade and Anne admits she could only get off with her husband after watching Jade and David have sex. The characters are just flat out unlikeable. Anne is some kind of pompous cougar who harbors a desire for David and writes long winded wordy to the point that they make no sense letters, Jade is a slutty harpy faux lesbian tease and David is just all sorts of awful and creepy. And clocking in at over four hundred pages, it truly feels endless. But you don't feel endless love for this story or it's characters, you feel endless annoyance and a wish that they all died in the fire at the beginning. 

Pit of despair

This is the story of the sick fuck who inspired the basement pit in Silence of the Lambs. Gary Heidnik kidnapped six women, raped and beat and imprisoned them. His goal was to impregnate the women and then raise a family in his basement. 

Englade covers Heidnik's crimes but he fails in creating a full profile of Heidnik quickly glossing over his childhood and claims of physical abuse at the hands of his father and his mother's alcoholism  to his multiple hospitalizations for his mental illness. On that note, I would like to point out Englade comes off as insensitive dick, he uses terms like nut job to describe Heidnik's psychiatric condition. 

After Heidnik's arrest this book turns into a boring courtroom procedural which makes this book feel longer than it actually is, at two hundred seventy-seven pages this should be a quick read, even for someone who reads as slow as I do, but Englade includes unnecessary courtroom details such as how hot the courtroom was and what the jurors were wearing, these details ut me to sleep. 

Also called into question is that of victim Josefina Rivera's role in the death of another victim and her treatment of her fellow captives. Was Rivera truly an accomplice to murder and the torture? If so was it because she grew sympathetic to Heidnik or was it a desperate attempt at appeasement to save her life? How desperate does one have to be to want to survive to live out another day of torture, rape and being forced fed human flesh? 

So was Heidnik insane or did he know right from wrong? I would say yes to both, of course you have to be mentally ill to kidnap six women and turn them into unwilling sex slaves to fulfill your personal goal of having a large family, but at the same time you can still know right from wrong. Heidnik did exhibit behavior of knowing what he was doing was wrong by disposing of a dead body by dismemberment and cooking some of the body parts to destroy physical evidence, he blasted a radio at full volume to cover up any cries for help that his neighbors might hear, he forced a victim (a woman that he knew for years) to write a letter to her family that she went to New York to throw them off of his trail and he mostly chose women who were mentally handicapped. 

The following is an interview with Josefina Rivera.

The devil likes them young

In search of Halloween thrills chills and scares I decided to read The Exorcist, a book that I thought for certain would make me piss myself. I mainly thought this because the film adaptation is something I cannot watch. Anytime I see a clip of it featuring Linda Blair in monster face I cry and have to sleep with a rosary under my pillow for months on end. After many years of debating wether or not to read it, I decided to go for it because I can visualize the characters anyway I want. 

I expected something more from this book, I honestly expected to be scared and have to sleep with the lights on but it didn't scare me. Instead of fear I felt boredom and irritation. I was so bored at times I actually fell asleep in the middle of reading sentences, I was irritated in general over how stupid and mundane it was. 

The build up to Regan's possession wasn't eventful, we got a few tapping noises and some moved furniture and pissing on the living room floor in front of party guests. What we don't get is why Regan? Why was she chosen by the demon for possession? If there was an explanation I don't remember it, it had to be more than just because she was playing with an ouija board. The demon wasn't very original when it came to insults, piglet and sow just don't cut it. I think if the demon spoke in Latin and only in Latin it would have made it creepier. Just imagine you have this evil looking little girl strapped to her bed, she's shouting in her demonic voice things at you that you can't understand and in a language you never heard before. All of the vomit spitting shitting and farting was excessive, I don't see how bodily functions are scary, gross yes, but scary, no. 

The possession of a tweenaged girl is fertile ground for psychological terror, imagine where you could go with that? 

I'm truly disappointed that this book didn't scare me, I found it to be too ridiculous to be frightened by it. I guess I just find real life to be scarier than anything a writer can come up with. 

Get behind thee Boredom

Here are some blurbs on the back of Legion.

"I devoured Legion in one terrified gulp. It even manages to out spook The Exorcist."- Los Angeles Times

"Heartbeat-skipping horror. Read Legion only on a sunny day."- Cosmopolitan 

"Ten times better than The Exorcist ... The suspense is breathtaking, and the ideas dark, deadly, and fascinating." The Cleveland Plain Dealer

So what the fuck what I reading? These blurbs are full of lies lies lies! Lies I say. 

This book is not scary, not terrifying and didn't really make much sense.

The story centers on Detective Kinderman, a real mensch, he reads books like Waiting for Godot, he questions the nature of God and why evil exists he loves old movies. He's Jewish liberally uses Yiddish loves his family and he's friends with Catholic priests. He's just all around swell, well read and smart. He gets assigned to a murder of a young boy who was crucified onto boat paddles then he has to deal with the murder of two priests. The suspects are a long dead serial killer a near catatonic old lady a dying neurologist and a chauvinistic asshole of a psychiatrist.  

I guess what makes this book so terrifying is that some evil force took possession of a dead priest who ended up in a psych ward as a John Doe bided its time then somehow manipulates these people into murdering people for it. The reason for these murders is because the long dead killer, the Gemini killer, has daddy issues and wants revenge and the evil force has scores to settle. 

This book left me bored and scratching my head, I felt a disconnect with the characters, especially the dying neurologist and his experiments with EVP and the sudden appearance of his "double". I really failed to see the point of that subplot. I felt the last few chapters were nothing more than a slapdash clusterfuck pieced together for the sole purpose to tie these characters and subplots together. 

Don't believe the blurbs on the back of this book and pick up something else to read.

American Horror Store(y)

I worked in retail for one long month, I hated every minute of it. Every one of those 30 days chipped away at my spirit, I couldn't get the hell out of there fast enough. It takes a very special kind of person  to work retail, God bless them. 

Horrorstor is the story of Amy, your every day 20 something wage slave working for an Ikea store knockoff. She's broke and with every passing day she gets broker. She's late on her rent, drives a crappy car and is concerned that she will soon lose her job. In a desperate bid to keep her job for as long as she can and earn some quick cash to keep her roommates off of her back with a partial rent payment she agrees to work over night with her manager Basil and fellow employee RuthAnne to figure out who or what's been causing damage to the store's inventory. 

As it turns out the store is haunted by a long dead warden and his prisoners. The warden's idea of reforming inmates was to torture them to death and drive them insane by inflicting painful pointless and monotonous tasks such as turning a hand crank for hours on end. Thanks to two co-workers who snuck in to film their ghost hunting reality show in a bid for TV stardom, the evil warden breaks through the spirit realm into the earth realm during a seance. Of course all hell breaks loose and Amy must confront her fears and grow up a little to save her co-workers.

I was immediately drawn to this book because of its design. You know that it's supposed to look like a generic Ikea catalog and the inside doesn't disappoint either. Just like an Ikea catalog, the inside has drawings of different Orsk (the name of the knockoff chain store) furniture and the schlocky descriptions of their form and function and of course how these particle board pieces of crap enrich your and your family's lives. 

Of course nothing about Horrorstor is horrifying or remotely "eek" inducing, it's a lot of fun and amusing. If you're looking for a scare then move onto the next book, but if you're looking for something a little different in a highly cliched genre, then this is the book for you.