Oboy! Thursday.

F.e.a.r.

So, I've been seeing a lot of ads for this game, F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault Recon). Check out the trailer. I'm not really one for video games. Sure, I've played my fair share of Final Fantasy VI, Super Mario 3, Pokemon, and Tetris, but I wouldn't really call myself a video gamer. I played and beat Half Life back in the day, and was addicted to WoW for a long time.

But those ads hit me in the right place. I'm a big fan of scares, and I loved the Resident Evil games. I've seen my share of horror films. So it just made sense to try this game out.

And so I did.

And it's fucking creepy. I wouldn't say it's amazingly scary, but it knows how to throw its weight around. From gore to little girls, this has all the things that'll haunt your dreams.

Check it out.

Ellis finally gets a movie

Finally, novelist Bret Easton Ellis gets one of his novels optioned for a film.

This never happens. No. Seriously.

Okay, it should be said that Ellis' books have never made a poor movie translation; all the above films are films I would buy and own until the day I die if I had the money. Particularly Rules and Psycho.

Ellis has, for a long time running, been one of my favorite modern novelists. For good reason; he crafts terrifying moralist tales featuring protagonists you can't stand. All while writing the most precise, sharp prose. Here's a review I wrote for the novel in question, which can be found on Amazon.com (I needed them to stop recommending me shitty books):

Bret Easton Ellis is, at his core, a moralist. And, due to this, all of his stories are true terror tales; this just happens to be the first one that's marketed as such.

And, again, he returns to his best--creating a protagonist you cannot like, with horrible traits and an anti-social demeanor. The only difference here is that the unlikeable protagonist turns out to be Bret himself, living a terribly quaint suburbian life with his terribly quaint suburban family; his wife, a model/actress, is the only part of the family who doesn't quite fit the normal role of 50's era family-hood; she's a jetsetter, though that's the only difference; she still fixes breakfast and readies her kids for school.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the novel is that it's not a novel about Bret being scared at all; it's a novel about fathers and sons, lost chances, and the inability to predict an outcome. Plus, there are some pretty terrifying moments relating to the Terby (a Furby-ish doll that belongs to Bret's fictitious daughter), lights, and the family dog.

I wouldn't rate this at the top of Ellis' writings, and I also wouldn't start reading here, if you're new to Ellis. This isn't his strongest work yet, though it is his most off-the-wall and mature book. Start with either The Rules of Attraction or The Informers, which will give you more of a sense of his prosaic style.



33 1/3 has a blog

The 33 1/3 series is a fantastic set of mini-books centered around the concept of writing about albums. I started with Colin Meloy's book about the Replacement's album Let it Be, and was both surprised at the fulfillment of the series' concept as well as Colin's brisk, fantastic writing; I purchased the album to go with the book and ended up falling in love with it. Just today, I received my copy of Kim Cooper's book on an album that I already consider one of my favorite albums of all time, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I'm excited to start it, as Kim Cooper is less of a story-teller than Colin Meloy (who spent his book telling the tale of how he fell in love with music; a sort of about the album by-way-of memoir). She's more a journalist; her fanzine Scram has been going on for years. I expect that this will be more about the band in question than anything else (which suits me fine, because NMH has never been that well documented).

A while back I found out that the series has its very own blog where you can follow up on their development and see what's coming next. Check it out, yo.