Early in Eddie Campbell’s painterly “picture novel,” The Black Diamond Detective Agency, the main character, Jackie Hardin, says, “We thought we had all the time in the world…. Tomorrow can take it all away” (7). And with the implied death of a young daughter and a bucolic description […]
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 […]
Henry Jenkins says Snakes on a Plane might do better than Serenity, two films with comparable prerelease internet buzz, and thinks Whedon should have broken out of the broadcast media mold: “…if he had gone that route, we would have been able to enjoy many more hours of […]
I don’t have much patience for vampire stories, so I never felt much attraction to the Buffy and Angel universe. I could see how people would get pretty wrapped up in it: ongoing storylines, smart characterization, constant action, snappy one-liners, reportedly the whole bit. When Joss Whedon, Buffy […]
Talk about a long journey. Stephen King wrote the first line of a short story called “The Gunslinger” in 1970, at the beginning of his career, and the first volume of the Dark Tower series was published in 1982. Nearly 35 years after its humble beginnings, the series […]
Prey is the latest science fiction thriller from perennial best-selling author, Michael Crichton. It’s been a few years since I read any Crichton novels so I was curious to see if my memory of his work – topical, easy to read in the way that bestsellers have, but […]
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The Cultural Gutter 