The authors of “Lovecraft Country” and “The Ballad of Black Tom” grapple with the imaginative legacy — and racism — of H.P. Lovecraft.
The Creepy Small Town (CST), with its sharp picket fences and toothy smiles, is an enduring favorite for good reason: it’s got everything. Adorable home-town spirit? Check. Vague, unsettling sense of menace? Check. Gardens on point? Check. Human sacrifice? Seriously almost always check (memo to protagonists who find themselves in a CST situation: just assume it’s human sacrifice.) […]
We all think of summer as a good time to dig into a frothy beach read, but it’s also the perfect occasion to pick up a title or two from your (sometimes daunting) “To-Read” list—and you know the one I mean. Even the most dedicated reader has a list of books they’ve been meaning to […]
In 2005, film critic Nathan Rabin coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl after seeing Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, calling her “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” You know when you’ve been hit with one—she’s […]
As anyone who suffers from insomnia knows, sometimes the scariest place in the universe is your own house. Even scarier? Other people’s houses, what with their questionable interior decoration decisions, pictures of people you don’t recognize, and the occasional portal to another dimension waiting to be stumbled upon in the upstairs hall. (Or the basement, though […]
