From a purely critical standpoint, Louis L’Amour’s The Walking Drum is a gruesome mess. It’s a historical novel that constantly hits the reader on the head with blocks of exposition. The hero, Kerbouchard, is not only a nigh-invulnerable fighter, he’s one of the finest scholars of the twelfth […]
Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown, a young adult fantasy novel from the early 1980s, always stood out in my memory as a formative read from childhood. Unfortunately I couldn’t really say what the book was about! Over the years, everything about it had faded. The Blue […]
I’m a porn journalist, and I live in the Canadian city of Vancouver. Ok, maybe I shouldn’t even call it a city… because in comparison to New York, it’s a small hick town, and I can say that with some degree of confidence after recently finally making my […]
Familiar tales, like Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid or The Snow Queen, have been reused and retold countless times. Sometimes the result is a mindless rip-off, and sometimes the familiarity of the structure lets a writer riff on the story in creative and surprising ways. It’s a […]
Since the first Cro-Magnon man set foot in the limestone caves of Lascaux, we have has a bittersweet relationship with cool, dank places. They provided mankind with much needed shelter from the elements, yet in their dark recesses they also supplied material for our nightmares — whether they […]
I get a lot of people asking me for book recommendations. That’s not all that strange, considering how much I read, and that I write a lot of reviews. All the same, I still find it hard to know what to say sometimes… tastes are so different. And […]
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The Cultural Gutter 