Horror is having a real moment right now

I tried to see as much as I could (not much)

What I did

For our third anniversary, my wife and I treated ourselves to a showing of The Book of Mormon at the National Theater in Washington, DC. This had been on my to-do list for quite some time, but I never really wanted to put in the effort of finding somewhere that was playing it. Luckily, the traveling tour was less than an hour away and its final weekend was conveniently close to our anniversary.

As expected, the show was fantastic. It was equally hilarious and horribly offensive and had me listening to the soundtrack in my spare time for the next week. If you ever have the opportunity to check it out, I’d say it’s worth the absurd price of admission.

What I watched

Apex - Netflix original survival thriller about a recently-widowed woman who is stalked and hunted by a psychopath in the Australian Outback. This was a shining example of the middling type of garbage that Netflix puts out and hopes that people will just stream it in the background of more entertaining goings-on. Absolutely nothing remarkable about this one at all except that Taron Egerton was entertaining as a creepy freak.

Hokum - A crotchety novelist travels to Ireland to spread the ashes of his parents at a creepy hotel. Another mild success from filmmaker Damien McCarthy. Much like his last two films Caveat and Oddity, this one does a lot with creepy atmosphere and production design, but failed to leave much of a lasting impression on me. I do think Hokum is the strongest of the three, mostly due to a compelling performance by Adam Scott.

Milk & Serial - A birthday prank goes sideways and tensions arise between a prankster duo. Seeing as this was reportedly made for only $800, it was surprisingly competent and made good use of the found footage gimmick. I just didn’t think there was much substance and probably would’ve ended up being 15 minutes long if shot conventionally.

Obsession - A man gets more than he bargained for when he wishes for his platonic friend to fall in love with him. I think the hype surrounding this one got to me, because while I liked it, I think it has a lot of problems that keep it from being great. There are some great comedic and terrifying bits, but they’re stuck in a kind of rambling and plot-light story. Inde Navarrette has been getting a lot of attention for her role as Nikki, which I think is very deserved.

Widow’s Bay (Apple TV) - In the last few days before our Apple TV subscription ran out, my wife and I decided to check out this horror/comedy show that has been getting buzz. The show follows Mayor Tom Loftis as he tries to promote and draw tourists to his island that is “the new Martha’s Vineyard” and “totally not cursed.”

Unfortunately the show is currently airing, so we were only able to check out the first half of the season, but I’m actually considering resubscribing to finish the series. It’s hilarious, but not in an over-the-top and predictable kind of way that you would expect. The writing is sharp and the horror elements aren’t overdone. They more kind of seep in at the edges of the show, which is primarily more like Parks and Recreation, but plaid a bit more straight.

What I read

I hit my goal of 26 books this year about 7 months too early, so I have upped my goal to 50. I’m going to try to read at least 12 books rather than listen to them. I’m a slow reader but a much quicker listener.

The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht - Complete trash novel that basically turns Frankenstein into a gay fantasy. Not that that’s inherently a bad thing, I just thought there was nothing of substance here at all. Luckily it was short enough to run through and quickly forget about.

Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo - A colony ship drifting aimlessly in space without purpose comes upon a seemingly abandoned planet and, shortly after, an abandoned alien space ship. I really wanted to like this, but in my opinion nothing interesting ever came of the premise. Instead, a bulk of the novel is concerned with the politics between leaders on the ship.

The Gone World by Thomas Sweterlitsch - An NCIS agent jumps back and forth in time and alternate dimensions as she tries to solve a murder and missing persons case. The mythology behind the technology and “science” in this novel completely blew me away and the way the story unravels and unfurls information kept me constantly engaged. The ending gets a bit muddled in the over-complicatedness of timelines, but it was well worth the read. It will probably end up being one of my favorite books I read this year.

Exponential by Adam Cesare - A murderous blob monster traps a handful of patrons inside of a bar on the outskirts of Las Vegas. This reminded me of a Syfy original movie that gets in, does its gruesome business, and gets out quickly without any fuss. For what it was, it was fine: a brief distraction that I will probably never think of again.

In the Eyes In the Shadows by Gage Greenwood - When Jackson sees a fleeting image in the eyes of his dying father, he spends his days trying to track down what exactly it was that he saw. Eventually this leads him to being haunted by the vengeful ghost of a dead teenager. This one did very little to differentiate itself from the dozens of other haunting stories I’ve read in the past few years. When it finally gets to the crux of the story, I literally said aloud “really? That was what this was building to?”

The Exorcist’s House by Nick Roberts - A family purchases the former home of an old man who died while locked in a battle with a demonic presence. Again, this was another haunting/possession story that goes through the paces of 99% of these kinds of books. Reading this was like dragging myself through a trench of broken glass, and not in a good way.

What I played

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers - This Chinese Soulslike game was added to Playstation Plus this month so I decided to see how long it would take for me to bounce off of it like I did with Wo Long and Black Myth: Wukong and Lords of the Fallen. The answer is: pretty quickly, but I got farther than I expected to. It’s actually a fairly well-designed action game with quite a few combat systems that play off each other nicely. At what I understand is about 20% through the game I came up against a boss that completely demoralized me and I decided to put the game down for good.

Magical Athlete - This board game, which is a remake/reimagining of a 2003 game (read: ancient), is a roll-and-move racing game where players draft wacky racers each with their own crazy game-breaking twist. The game is played over four races, and the player that has accumulated the most points (through race placement or other means) by the end of the game wins.

Even though the core gist of the game is rolling a die and moving your character, it’s the chaos that the variable character powers bring that make the game shine. Games are quick and dirty and, across the two games I played, create enough laughs to justify its existence. As long as you don’t really care about winning, this is a game I can see a lot of people who don’t play a lot of board games being willing to play.

Pendulum - After sitting on my shelf for years without a play, I decided to take this real-time worker placement game to my weekly game night for a spin before I decided to get rid of it. In Pendulum, players are some kind of time lords vying to become the ruler of some fantasy land. The story is practically non-existent, which actually hurt the game more than I thought it would.

Gameplay consists of playing workers to one of three zones, each of which is separated into two rows. As the game goes on, sand timers are flipped and block one of the two rows in each zone, signalling to players which rows can be played to and which rows can have their actions resolved. While the sands are draining, players are free to move their workers around the board as much as they want, as long as the timer isn’t moved to block the area they’re moving to/from. As you’d expect, the game then vacillates rapidly between players’ arms clashing as they try to move around simultaneously and then long stretches of people staring at sand timers waiting to move on to the next action. I give this game some points for attempting to stretch the hobby into a different dimension, but in practice it did not work for me at all.

Fromage - The last new game that I want to talk about is the cheeze-themed worker placement game Fromage. Much like Pendulum, Fromage kind of plays with timing, but in a much less frenetic and much more thematic way. On any given turn, each player is privy to one quarter of the large circular board. Each of these quadrants plays like a separate mini-game that sees you completing collecting sets, controlling areas, or even placing cheese in contiguous groups. On your turn you can only play on your quadrant, but each turn sees the board rotate away from you, turning your workers with it. Only when your worker is facing you again can you retrieve him to use again. So in a way, time in a resource to be spent: more expensive actions take longer for the board to rotate your worker back toward you and quick actions may have your worker back next turn.

I fully expected the separate scoring sectors to feel disparate and disconnected from one another, and to a degree they are, but you’re given such a finite amount of time, you can never spread yourself out too thin amongst the different routes to score points. In the end, the game feels the exact right length to let you dabble in a few strategies without going fully into one thing.