ninetyninecenthorror-blog

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Book Review: Nyctophobia by Christopher Fowler

Books are a gamble, and basing your decision on whether or not to read the book based on the synopsis is a chance one has to take especially if you’re not familiar with the author. Slowly catching up with technology trends, I recently started using the Kindle app for leisurely reading and I randomly happened to buy two books by the same author, Christopher Fowler, a feat I didn’t even realize until I was knee deep in the disappointing Nyctophobia. I’m a stickler for names whether that’s a character’s name or the title of a book, those things are very important to me as a reader and writer; when I start a project, I need to have names, I go from characters to plot not the other way around. I chose Nyctophobia based on the title, meaning an extreme fear of darkness, which offers a endless string of possibilities on how to approach that as a story. It also more humorously reminded me of a failed “novella”/”total rip-off of Halloween 2″ that I wrote when I was a teenager that I called Thantaphobia (fear of death).

Anyway, how Fowler approaches this idea is by using that phobia in the guise of a haunted house story. Which admittedly is not super interesting to begin with. However the setting of the book takes place in Spain and the house, possibly the most distinguished and characterized character in the book, actually has a built-in camera obscura with a great emphasis on huge windows to allow constant light in. There’s discussion of the occult and astrology, but as everything in the book is presented, it’s written in a rather factual way not fantastical. Maybe I’m too far into my film major to be judging a book as such but it really feels like it’s doing a lot of “Telling” and not “Showing” (which is kind of a stupid thing to criticize a book about). There’s also so much redundancy in the plot, constantly reminding us of revelations about the history of Hyperion House -and for that matter the main character’s backstory- that we already know because the book keeps repeating them. There’s something very flat about the writing here, specifically with the characters. This is not helped by the book’s first-person perspective. Even though we are told kind of specifically but not really the details about the main character’s Callie’s tragic history, there’s really no clear understanding of her motivations or more importantly why she’s scared of the dark. This particularly comes into play once the spookier things happen and she constantly internally-dialogues about no one understanding her, but the moment someone offers her help she callously rejects them. (For example, one of the few people in the small town who has befriended her offers her help and Callie’s train of thought immediately insults her because she’s an older woman who drinks) There isn’t any real reason other than superficial attraction as to why she and her much older husband are even in love with each other and her mother is written to be so obnoxiously nasty she’s like she’s out of some soap opera.

The main kicker though is that every interesting idea this story has, it’s wasted. Without spoiling the ending of Nyctophobia per-say, I’m gonna bring up a different book called The Other Side which is about a woman who’s son begins to act very strangely after buying a mirror. That book never actually reveals the workings of the mirror, instead staying in reality the entire time and thus robbing the reader of an explanation. However at the same, not knowing what was on the other side of the mirror allows for its own kind of disturbing imagery. As one’s own imagination is likely scarier than whatever the book could have come up with. Nyctophobia offers an explanation, which may or not be vaguely similar to The Other Side, but it’s rushed and Callie proves to be an extremely unreliable narrator which makes the finale dove-tail into that kind of “inescapable evil” ending (which even then is debatable). 

I hate to explain what happened should you be curious but the point is that overall I found the book to be incredibly mediocre and I’m not sure if I’m more irritated that I paid for it or that I actually bothered to read it all the way through. Your Heart Belongs to Me by Dean Koontz continues to be the champion of books I am so mad at myself for finishing, but Nyctophobia was not good.

2.7 out of 5

The thing is, this is exactly how Stuart Wellington would react to the ending of this book,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrGB8m26Gjw

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First Impressions: MTV’s Scream the TV Series

There’s no getting around the fact that I and most people aren’t thrilled about a TV adaptation of the hit 1996 Wes Craven film that re-ignited the slasher genre in the late 90s/early 00s. With that in mind coming off of the 4th Scream film that came out a few years ago, the prospects of a TV serial version weren’t impossible. But that’s not considering the negative qualities that are hitting this show before it even starts: namely the removal of the iconic Ghostface mask/costume. Already, we’re getting an imitation of the films, something that doesn’t instill any hope for this series; so how do I watch this? As a fan of the film series or just as a casual viewer of MTV?

Considering the only thing I’ve watched on MTV in recent years that wasn’t Daria re-runs was Awkward., which I lost traction with after the second season, I’m trying very hard not to let the bias I have affect what I’m watching. It’s hard. It’s very hard when the pilot is trying to hit similar beats of the original movie and its characters, as well as other unrelated movies and characters (see; I Know What You Did Last Summer and Cherry Falls [a movie that was already a knock-off of Scream, which is just incomprehensibly meta]). I’m straddling this line of deciding whether the series is intentionally shallow (the opening scene, I’ll get to) or mockingly shallow. These conversations they’re having are so weighty with cleverness and self-awareness that it makes none of the characters believable in any capacity or more importantly just likeable. I guess I like the Randy stand-in and the girl who’s a victim of an unwarranted viral video because they’re the least terrible and at least their conversations about movies are ones I have had (in a formal matter that works for essays and analysis not for casual conversation). The end of the episode has the Randy stand-in just outright state the thesis of the show, which boils down to “You have to care about the characters cause that’s what makes it scary.” Again I don’t know whether or not I can take anything this character says seriously or if it’s supposed to be a winking commentary. The main character Emma is not interesting and about as shallow as the rest of her horrible obnoxious friends. I think the show wants me to want them all to die. The preview for the upcoming season slightly turned my brain to mush because I get that this isn’t supposed to be the film series, but I have no clue what it is supposed to be.

That being said, the opening scene of this show starts with a character dying ala Drew Barrymore. I keep trying not to say “this is hard to care about” but the fact of the matter is, it is hard to care about when this character is immediately depicted as an unlikeable person. She is later described as a sociopath, which makes me wonder why I should care about what happens to her if her death isn’t going to be traumatic or haunting in any sense like Barrymore’s Casey was. It is much more in vein with the above clip from Scream 2, that is the recreation of Casey’s death in the in-universe film Stab; it’s sexually exploitative, it’s cartoonishly violent and uninspired, and it depicts a character who is supposed to be a teenager but apparently lives in this insanely posh house with all the latest technologies and who ends up running around in her skivvies until she’s stabbed to death. The difference is that the Stab version is a pointed satire of slasher films and recreations of real-life events. The Scream TV series version is the inertia that starts the story. The scene involving finding the girl’s body is so much of an afterthought that there’s nothing to register in a moment where a mother finds the corpse of her daughter. The opening just perfectly encapsulates how this pilot has completely missed the point of the original movie(s).

But is that intentional? At this point, I honestly can’t tell.

D

Final thought: The anti-cigarette commercials are more dramatic and terrifying than anything that just happened on the show.

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Fathom Event: Jaws 40th Anniversary

I botched the first opportunity I had to watch Jaws back in high school. I was at boarding school and during Homecoming weekend there was a big all-around campus festival happening which included a screening of Jaws at the pool. So I did get to see part of this movie while floating helplessly in an inner tube but my poor social skills and crippling inability to swim forced me to leave before long. To be honest I don’t even remember what part I saw, I just know that it was the earlier beach scenes, possibly before the little boy gets devoured.

Annnnywho, I’ve now rectified that by getting to watch the 40th anniversary re-release in theaters. I love watching classic films on the big screen, and as the movie started I tried to envision the sense of thrill that must have transpired for audiences back in 75′ when they were seeing Jaws for the first time. The audience I saw it with was small but also engaged. It wasn’t a case of people being callous and ridiculing an old movie for having cheesy effects, it was just people taking in what is considered to be the first major “Summer Blockbuster”. I myself was happy that the film managed to make me hop out of my seat a few times even though I know the gist of the plot beats. I thoroughly enjoyed the partnership of Dreyfuss and Scheider’s characters and the cinematography was actually very impressive. I think the only qualms I have is the inconsistency with light, particularly in that opening kill scene, is it evening or dawn? Night time or day time?

But if this film is the reason so many people feared the waters for so long, then times have certainly changed because all I want to do now is go take a nice long dip in the ocean and chill on the sand with my back to the sun. I live in Southern California and I’ve just recently learned how to swim, and this movie really just rejuvenated my love of being out on the beach and swimming. I wouldn’t want to meet a shark but I am so much more trusting of myself in the water that I can’t stay away from it now.

In conclusion, it’s a great thrilling movie. Here’s my favorite moment in the film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BinyLUJwKEg

A-

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I just watched: THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN (2014)

I certainly appreciate that this is a self-aware and meta film, while still taking itself seriously and not trying to be satirical or have a laugh at the original movie or its gruesome true life origins. Then again I can’t speak for the truthfulness of this movie and its characters, but I didn’t get the impression that it was trying to be distasteful. I was baffled by the editing in this which is so oddly tight and fast paced. The movie’s only 84 minutes and it feels like it with the way they chop up the action sequences in such a tight way that it all happens so quick and clean, that it doesn’t allow for much room to react to anything that happens. The original movie is much more like a prolonged crime scene re-enactment which does come across as disturbing because it is based on a true story, so this film taking the movie-within-the-movie approach actually helps separate it. This certainly feels like a much more Hollywood version of that story what with the insatiable violence and the killer who is just insanely precise and immediately in the right place at the right time. Ridiculous editing aside, especially during the final confrontation, it’s a super quick watch that is actually pretty compelling and takes the time to characterize Texarkana as much as the actual characters.

B-