Our last visit to the wild world of Adam Nevill--where everyone is depressed and from London--involved a sinister and violent cult. Let’s take a return trip via last year’s The Reddening, which also involves a sinister and violent cult!
Read MoreLong-time readers of my blog(s) will know of my epic and eternal quest for good horror content across all mediums. While I’ve found high-quality offerings in the realms of games, movies and short stories, good horror novels elude me; books that seem promising inevitably fall into the familiar issues of over-explaining and neutering their horror elements, with a regularity that makes me think this is an inherent problem with trying to write full-length horror stories.
Things got so bad that I started to give up entirely on the idea of finding good, spooky material on bookshelves. But then, across the internet, a name started to echo. A saviour. An author fit to single-handedly rescue the horror genre. That name: Adam Nevill.
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With its eighth and final episode, His Dark Materials moves into territory that fans have been waiting more than a decade for: the end of Northern Lights, which the 2007 movie bafflingly decided to save for the (never-made) next movie. The adaptation here isn’t perfect, but it offers a visually stunning rendition of the book’s infamous downer ending that doesn’t pull any punches and hits all the desired emotional beats, even if some of the creative choices weigh it down slightly.
Let’s address the biggest flaw first: Will’s story. I’ve flip-flopped back and forth over whether the decision to pull Subtle Knife material into the first season was a good or bad choice, and overall I have to lean, very slightly, towards the latter. Cutting between Lyra’s world and real-world London just overall doesn’t really work for me as someone who’s familiar with Lyra’s story without those impositions, and while it may well end up working in the second season’s favour, that’s not the season I’m reviewing.
I did say I’m leaning slightly towards the decision being a bad idea because I actually like how the Will-centric parts of the story were executed just fine; Amir Wilson in particular is very promising as a co-lead to join Dafne Keene. It’s just when it’s interspersed with the rest of the plot that it becomes a problem.
The show’s other flaw lies with the dialogue, which can occasionally get a little clunky, particularly when the characters need to deliver exposition. At times it’s warm and lively, while elsewhere it can feel artless and mechanical. This is a problem that crops up in the first episode and persists all the way through the series, probably due to the fact that Jack Thorne, primary writer of Harry Potter and The Cursed Child, wrote all eight episodes. He’s a lot better here, but I’m still glad that season two brought in more writers rather than relying solely on his somewhat inconsistent talents.
The dialogue issues go more noticeable in show’s second half; this, combined with some occasional—and relatively minor—pacing issues lead me to prefer the first four episodes to the ones that followed. In the early episodes the story feels more relaxed and has more time to stretch out, whereas later on I feel like it’s getting squeezed a bit by the necessity of hitting plot points and delivering information to the viewer (to be fair, some of this stems from the book, which is at times structured very oddly and feels like it was partially made up as it was being written).
Going back to this episode specifically, I appreciate that the series decided to depict Lyra crossing between worlds through a tear in the fabric of reality in a very quiet, sombre way. It would have been easy to go for a more adventrous, “epic” feel, and maybe that would have been more emotionally satisfying, but on balance I feel that the downbeat approach was truer to both the story itself and the tone that the series has so far been employing.
Actually, that kind of summarizes my feelings on the season as a whole: there were probably more purely entertaining ways to handle the source material that would have felt closer in tone and style to Northern Lights, but my approach to adaptations has always been that if I want to re-experience the original, I can just go back to it. The people handling His Dark Materials made some daring choices, and while not all of them landed, I appreciate the fact that they were taken. Roll on season two.
Blog Note
No episode analysis this time since it feels a bit redundant now that we’ve reached the end. Writing this post series, as much as I’ve enjoyed it, took a lot out of me due to my ongoing medical problems, so I’m going to take a whole month off blogging to recover. I’ll see you all at the end of January for more internet fun-times.
Good news everyone, my brain co-operated enough to let me put out this combined post earlier than planned!
Read MoreJust a quick note to say that due to health reasons, the final three posts in my award winning and critically acclaimed His Dark Materials TV reviews will be combined into one following the end of the season on the 23rd; that post will also serve as my overall review of the season as a whole.
Following that, I’ll likely be taking a month off from blogging of all kinds to recharge the batteries. See y’all next year!
AKA The Subtle Knife: Episode 01
Read MoreHaving waded through Phillip Pullman’s over-saturated His Dark Materials prequel, it’s time to steer our canoe onto the main event: The Secret Commonwealth, an honest-to-Authority sequel to the original trilogy. Will it fare better than La Belle Sauvage, or capsize? Will I be able to fit any more puns into this opening paragraph?
The answer to the last question is no, but you’ll need to read on for the rest.
WHO’S READY FOR POLAR BEARS?
Read MoreBlogger note: Apologies about the short post last time folks, I was having a major flare-up of my neurological symptoms. That’s thankfully passed now.
As I’ve said multiple times previously, the opening parts of Northern Lights were always going to be the hardest to adapt. The first two episode of the BBC’s His Dark Materials series did a good jump of overcoming the hurdles, albeit with some stumbles on the way. Now that the set-up is out of the way the third episode dives headfirst into the adventure, and the results are very positive indeed.
Read MoreAfter a first episode that stuck mostly to the source material, it’s time to get a little wild in an exciting but uneven follow-up.
Read MoreIT'S POLAR BEAR TIME Y'ALL
Well, not quite. First we need to head to Oxford.
The first episode of The Beeb's big-budget His Dark Materials adaptation is finally out. I'm going to be covering every episode, with each post consisting of a review (for normal people), followed by a more in-depth analysis (for awesome people). The analysis sections will contain spoilers for both the episode in question, future episodes, and all of the books (and thus potentially the entire rest of the series, depending on how closely it follows the source material), but the reviews won't spoil anything besides the current and previous episodes.
With that out of the way: what did I think of the first episode?
Read MoreAs outlined in the epic-length His Dark Materials post I wrote years ago, after the publication of the His Dark Materials trilogy Phillip Pullman planned to put out three additional books. The first two—Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon A Time In The North—were short stories (very short, in the case of the former), published in neat little hardbacks and with supplamentary material that gave some little insights into the HDM setting. The third book, The Book of Dust, was intended to be a more substantial collection of short stories focusing on various characters and time periods.
Fans waited patiently for it. And waited. And waited. After well over a decade of waiting (and following the failure of the Golden Compass movie), most people had resigned themselves to the fact that it was never coming out, despite Pullman talking about it fairly regularly in interviews. Then something happened to reinvigorate the HDM fandom: the new BBC TV series was announced.
I don’t have any evidence that the show’s green-lighting had anything to do with The Book of Dust finally emerging from hibernation, but I find it interesting that the first volume was released a few months before the first wave of concrete details—like a cast—was announced.
Regardless of how it happened, The Book of Dust is finally making its way to us as a trilogy that takes place both before and after the first three His Dark Materials novels. As we all know, prequels and sequels to beloved franchises are always a sure bet, pleasing both the ardent fanbase and the pop-cultural landscape at large. Let’s see what the first one is like.
Read MoreNow that my self-indulgent October series is finished, it’s time…for another self-indulgent blog series!
A certain TV show I’ve been anticipating for a long time is beginning on the 4th of November. Starting a few days later (I’m away from internet access on the day of the premiere), I’ll be reviewing every episode in far more depth than any sensible person could ever possibly want or enjoy. Since there’ll be eight episodes, that should take us right up to the end of the year (with polar bear month, you get two months for the price of one).
But wait, there’s more! I’m also going to be posting reviews of La Belle Sauvage and The Secret Commonwealth, the two currently-available volumes of The Book of Dust.
But wait, there’s even more!
Actually no, that’s all I have planned for November and December. Anything else you get is going to be off the cuff.
Here's a case that's popular with online sleuths, but has somehow not become more well known in mainstream circles, which is frankly astonishing since it includes some of the creepiest video footage I've ever seen. We're talking about a murder mystery where we have extensive footage of the perpetrator at the scene of the crime, and yet the case remains unsolved more than three years later. If police have any leads, they have yet to inform the public.
Read MoreAmong weirdos who spend a lot of time online theorizing over unsolved mysteries, most have a “pet case” that we they come back to again and again. One such case that some people keep coming back to is the disappearance of nine year old Asha Degree in 2000. It is, in my opinion, easily among the most baffling in the annals of American missing persons cases and deserves far more attention than it gets.
Read MoreHere's a story you've heard before: a person or persons is driving along a remote highway in America late at night. They haven't seen another car in quite some time. A mysterious light appears in the sky and follows them. They're struck with a sense of terror and dread, which only increases when the light gets nearer and they realize it's some sort of craft. Then they suddenly wake up, their car stationary by the side of the road, with no recollection of stopping the car or falling asleep. Several hours have passed unaccounted for. Vague, unsettling memories circulate in our hapless protagonists' heads and they go home with a lingering sense that something bad has happened.
As I said, you've heard all of this before. What you may not know is that this story didn't percolate out of the collective unconsciousness in bits in pieces. The archetypical alien abduction story has a defined origin point: the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill.
Read MoreIf you’ve been paying attention to the horror scene lately, you’ll know that A Quiet Place ushered in a bold new creative direction for the genre: movies about monsters that kill you if you do a certain thing. This is an idea that’s just rife with potential. So far we have A Quiet Place, which is about monsters that kill you if you make noise, Bird Box which is about monsters that kill you if you look at them, and The Silence which is about monsters that kill you if you, uh...make noise.
Maybe it doesn’t have that much potential after all.
Read MoreYou’ll frequently find this story referred to as the “American Dyatlov Pass”, named after the infamous Dyatlov Pass incident where a bunch of people in Russia were killed in an avalanche and then the story got embellished into something unnecessarily sinister. Unlike Dyatlov Pass, the tale of the Yuba County Five is actually mysterious and has a lot of genuinely eerie details.
Read MoreDespite making fun of the guy several times on both this and my previous blog (and on twitter, and about once or twice a month in real life), I have nothing against Stephen King. I even like some of his work. It’s just that he’s one of the most famous and most popular authors in modern history, and he has a collection of quirks and recurring foibles that are very easy to mock.
This is all preamble in order to explain why the idea of a competent Stephen King imitation is something I’m drawn towards, rather than recoiling from.
Read MoreI swear this story is better than the title makes it sound.
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