Kris Reads Horror, Fantasy, And Sci-Fi

Akata Witch, often called “Nigerian Harry Potter”, shares a lot of similarities with many modern witch tropes, and brings its own refreshing spin to the table with its cultural roots. The main character, Sunny, an albino Nigerian girl born in New York City, and her fellow leopard people in a world of lambs, share in the outcast nature that witch stories often share. Sunny is raised in a harsh, traditional patriarchal family led by her father, where she notices a difference between how her family treats her versus her brothers. Once she is initiated into the Leopard world, she finds solidarity in her coven of four other leopard witches and strong people of varying backgrounds to look up to. The Leopard people of the story draw their power from nature, and through that understanding themselves, another common theme of witch-themed works. To add, the power of knowledge is highly respected in the world of Akata Witch, forming even the basic currency system of the Leopard world. She eve...

The genre of “weird” is an interesting sub-genre to discuss among fans of horror, fantasy, and sci-fi, since it’s as ambiguous as the monsters it describes. Most weird fiction, I find, deals with the inhuman, creatures beyond the human experience that we can never truly describe. It’s a genre that truly captures the fear of the unknown and what we cannot understand. Because this, the genre tends to be much more image-focused, which makes sense, seeing as our physical senses are what allows us to perceive the world. H.P. Lovecraft, whose work I read for this post, is a master at harnessing that fear in his work. Since the rest of his writing is rather (appropriately) lacking in an understanding of human emotion and interaction, his writing is often considered the foundation for the weird genre. Because of this lack of social understand, reading his work to me often felt like one of those monster trying to understand how humans interact. Perhaps more appropriately, it’s a rich white...

My assumptions, this week, were thrown out the window. Reading A Wild Sheep Chase, I had heard it was a sort of mystery. Having previously taken a Mystery and Thrillers writing class, I assumed an investigation of some sort. With the book starting off dealing with the disappearance of The Rat, a close friend of the unnamed main character, I assumed a more typical investigation would be the plot. I did not expect a magical mind-corrupting sheep, an inhuman representative of Japan’s most powerful figures, and a woman whose ears had the power to attract anyone she wanted. What I found most interesting about this book was the lack of focus on any good vs. evil dichotomy, which is more typically found in Western works of similar genres. Most Western mystery and horror works have a very clearly defined “good” side (the protagonist, their friends, etc.) and “evil” side (the monster, criminal, etc.). In A Wild Sheep Chase, however, everything just sort of happens to the protagonist. There ...

Meanwhile, Lestat struggles with a whole separate aspect of immortality: loneliness. While the story is told through someone else’s perspective, we never learn about what Lestat is like as his own person. The audience only hears about Lestat in his relation to other people. He refuses to talk about what he was like before Louis became his companion, growing incensed at the mere mentioning of the subject. I believe this is a source of one of Lestat’s defining characteristics: Lestat can’t bear the thought of being alone. This is the source of many of his abusive behaviors. We see this in his actions towards Louis, as Lestat’s is at his cruelest whenever Louis threatens to leave him. He’s so desperate for codependency that he turns a child into an immortal vampire, doomed to be trapped in the body of a five-year-old for eternity, as a way to trap Louis. He essentially forces Louis to join in his horrific immortal family. Hell, he is so desperate for Louis’s companionship that he h...

Because my Interview With The Vampire post was dark, here's something with vampires that's funny. What We Do In The Shadows  is one of my favorite movies and for class I made a lip sync animation using one of the lines.

Interview With The Vampire is Anne Rice’s classic not-quite-erotica novel of love, death, humanity, and grief. Using the archetypal vampire, Rice explores these concepts once you add immortality into the mix, which of course makes even the most basic friendships much more complicated. While immortality seems great to us mortal humans, could we even possibly fathom what hundreds if not thousands of years must do to someone psychologically (especially when murder is necessary for survival)? Each of the major characters in the novel reflect one of the gravest downfalls of immortality: change. On top of it all, their relationships only intensify their different-yet-horrible situations. Death is the ultimate bringer of change, which permeates the life of a vampire. Louis, who is the one recounting the novel, struggles with this reality the most out of all the vampire. He was manipulated by Lestat into becoming a vampire during a period of great depression and grief, which he seems to...