Wildest Things (scifi,horror,& fantasy)

For this week I read The Magicians by Lev Grossman. It's about a high school senior named Quentin who is full of angst and disappointment about his average life until one day he finds himself on the lawn of a magic school called Brakebills. Suddenly the magic and adventure he's craved his entire life is within reach. He's no longer bored with life, and no longer just another average nerd. Throughout the first chapter, we see Quentin moping over his mediocrity nonstop--even through finding a dead body. His biggest concern is himself and what people might think of him.  The story takes place during one of the biggest transitional stages in his life: moving from high school to college. While I was reading this I kept thinking about something I read in a psychology class. I can't remember exactly what theory it's from, or who wrote it, but it was about developmental psychology. There's a stage in human life where we feel like we're the hero of our stories waiti...

For this week, I picked up Aunt Maria by Diana Wynne Jones*. I don't want to say that I was "pleasantly surprised". Pleasantly is not a strong enough word. And surprised isn't quite right either, because I already knew somewhere deep down that DWJ books were good, I just had never really seized an opportunity to read one. Aunt Maria is a story told through our main character, Mig, writing in her journal. It's an interesting way to read the story, because just when you start to forget that you're reading someone else's account of what happened and not as it happened, she pulls you back out, switching to a new scene or event that was relevant to Mig's day. It's a technique that I haven't seen very often, and I think it works well for this character. It lets us see her inner thoughts and emotions while she's in situations where she's constantly being made to repress her true feelings. There's a lot of mystery in the story, little bi...

Before this topic, I don't think I'd ever heard the term "new weird". It's basically a blended subgenre that comes from old pulp magazines, where horror/scifi/fantasy and the supernatural could all be blended interchangeably to tell a unique flavor of stories. I had my first introductions to H.P. Lovecraft with What the Moon Brings, and Angela Carter, with some of her short stories. In What the Moon Brings, I was at first a little too distracted by the purple-y voice to really get into the narrative. Although I did really like the first line, "I hate the moon--I am afraid of it--for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous." That's a great hook, and it works to summarize the whole story in a way. The rest of the writing feels a little too ornate (ahem--pretentious?) for me to truly enjoy the story, but I guess it does help to enforce the dream-state of the narrative. It's about a man ...