First Lines of Stephen King's "Holly"

 "It's an old city, and no longer in very good shape, nor is the lake beside which it has been built, but there are parts of it that are still pretty nice. Longtime residents would probably agree that the nicest section is Sugar Heights, and the nicest street running though it is Ridge Road, which makes a gentle downhill curve from Bell College of Arts and Sciences to Deerfield Park, two miles below. On its way, Ridge Road passes many find houses, some of which belong to college faculty and some to the city's more successful businesspeople--doctors, lawyers, bankers, and top-of-the-pyramid business executives. Most of these homes are Victorians, with impeccable paintjobs, bow windows, and lots of gingerbread trim."

- Stephen King, Holly

Another speedy read by the prolific King. This one contains some nasty scenes, but also has a lot of that folksy King observational prose which can be so addicting. Not the best of his novels I've ever read - I found the choice to reveal the who behind the whodunit to take the edge off of the suspense - but still a fun read to start off the new year.

Also: was surprised to wake up in the middle of the night to find that the writing and windows on the cover are glow-in-the-dark! Surprisingly creepy.

First Lines of Max Brooks "World War Z"

 "It goes by many names: 'The Crisis,' 'The Dark Years,' 'The Walking Plague,' as well as newer and more 'hip' titles such as 'World War Z' or 'Z War One.' I personally dislike this last moniker as it implies an inevitable 'Z War Two.' For me, it will always be 'The Zombie War,' and while many may protest the scientific accuracy of the word zombie, they will be hard-pressed to discover a more globally accepted term for the creatures that almost caused our extinction. Zombie remains a devastating word, unrivaled in its power to conjure up so many memories or emotions, and it is these memories, and emotions, that are the subject of this book." 

- Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Nothing like the Brad Pitt movie, Brooks' excellent novel is essentially a collection of short stories detailing the contours of a zombie outbreak. Relentlessly inventive and covering all sorts of details, I particularly appreciated its global approach - while there is a huge focus on the US, large chunks of the book take place in all areas of the globe, each contributing to the narrative with their unique local color. My only quibble is that the nature of the book - each "short story" is told via an interview - sometimes can feel static: you experience the action at a remove, though a story, rather than by being immersed in it. Regardless I finished the book in a matter of days and would recommend it to anyone who appreciates a good adventure story.

First Lines of Kevin Lucia's "Liminal Spaces"

 "I'm sitting, crisscross-applesauce, in the deepest part of the deepest end of the Twin Oaks Community swimming pool, but down here, I may as well be sitting on Mars. My eyes are closed, have been closed, for about five minutes."

- from "Written in Water," by Robert Ford, the first story in Liminal Spaces: An Anthology of Dark Speculative Fiction edited by Kevin Lucia.

Lucia writes that this anthology offers takes on "dark specultative stories about the in-between. ... Neither here nor there. Strange stories about poeple and places lost in a shadowy, hazy middle-ground." Thus these are tales a person or a place with a dark- often occult - secret, and the fun comes from the journey of discovering that secret. I enjoyed it but like with most collections there mixed results based on your personal taste. For example, Jessica McHugh's "Back to One" and Chad Lutzke's "Womb with a View" were too grotesque for me. But most were quite entertaining. My highlights were "The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own," Gwendolyn Kiste's take on the Black Dahlia; "Mirror, Mirror" Joshua Palmatier's fantasy offering; "O Adelin," Michael Wehunt's Lovecraftian post-apocalyptic tale; and the twisted logic of Norman Prentiss' "Cabinet People." 

First Lines of Jeff VanderMeer's "Authority"

 "In Control's dreams it is early morning, the sky deep blue with just a twinge of light.  He is staring down from a cliff down into an abyss, a bay, a cove. It always changes. He can see for miles into the still water. He can see ocean behemoths gliding there, like submarines or bell-shaped orchids or the wide hulls of ships, silent, even moving, the size of them conveying such a sense of power that he can feel the havoc of their passage even from so far above. He stares for hours at the shapes, the movements, listening to the whispers echoing up to him... and then he falls. Slowly, too slowly, the falls soundless into the dark water, without splash or ripple. And keeps falling."

- Jeff VanderMeer, Authority.

I put off writing this until after my second time reading the novel. Why? Because Authority is a strange book. Summarizing the plot makes it sounds either dull or pedestrian. But it's far from that - I'm convinced it's a masterpiece of mood, an elegiac study in paranoia that leads one to question everything, to assume a position of paranoia. It's also a slow burn; if not for a bout of insomnia I'm not sure I would have made it past the first few chapters as they are slow compared to the taught mysteries of Annihilation (the first book of the trilogy). But I'm very glad I prevailed - once the book picks up steam you ride along with Control on a ride of mysteries, of corporate secrets and plots, of scientific paradoxes, of business power structures, of clandestine organizations, all in service to uncovering the great mystery of Area X. In my first reading, I equated it to the alien detritus of Roadside Picnic, but it's more then that (as Acceptance, the final book in the trilogy, reveals). But looking for answers is besides the point. VanderMeer has spun a creepy tale that dramatizes our fruitful search for meaning in, well, just about anything, resulting in even the most anodyne of things potential objects of betrayal, horror, or confusion. It's a hell of a ride - and one that was even better the second time around. 

Related Posts:

First Lines of  Jeff VanderMeer's "Annihilation"

Book Review: "Road Side Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

 

First Lines of Premee Mohamed's "These Lifeless Things"

"Today we dug up bones in the Botanical Garden.

I was briefly, reflexively confused: How did these get here? But what a question. People just die where they die."

 

- Premee Mohamed, These Lifeless Things

A fun novel covering what would happen if Lovecraftian creatures didn't immediately destroy our sense of reality. What would learning about such creatures do to us? What meaning is there in a world where such creatures exist? What would we do? The parts of the novel that deal with these questions are the strongest, utilizing the 1st person to share delicious observations in line with someone struggling to make sense of something unknowable: "Pain is interesting, I was told when I started my studies. People don't want to read about happiness. They want to read about pain. That's what will get you published."

 

I enjoyed the book's post-apocalyptic world with the left-over quality of a Roadside Picnic or The Leftovers even if I felt like the slow burn towards a final quest was a bit forced.

 

 

Book Review: "The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories" (ed. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer)

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer's The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories is an impressive accomplishment. I've tried to write this review a number of times and nothing I do is capturing my experience of reading it's 1000+ pages. So let me just write some words.

The VanderMeers compiled the best "weird" stories over the last century. By weird, we're not talking horror - although that is often an element in these stories. Weird here often means surreal and bizarre, but can also be tender and moving. To me, the common element is often an element of surprise, not from jump scares but from a joyful examination of an impeccable internal logic. Exploring the strange takes one many, many forms, and all of them are included here: From the different worlds in Michel Bernanos' surreal "The Other Side of the Mountain" to SciFi dystopias (perhaps best represented in Craig Padawer's "Meat Garden"), to lots and lots of strange creatures (Lovecraft's classic "Dunwich Horror" but also "Margaret st. Clair's "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles").

The first portion of the book (its arranged chronologically) is almost quaint in it's pre-ironic story telling. There's a good slice of surrealism, a lot of monsters, and a good amount of gothic tales. 

As the book progresses, the stories get more brutal - or more tender. The older I get, the less appeal gore and horror have for me, but Daniel Abraham's masterful "Flat Diane" plays horror wonderfully with parental guilt and the "Flat Stanley books (and killer lines like "The best trick Hell has to play against its inmates is to whisper to them that this - this now - is the bottom. Nothing can be worse than this. And then to pull the floor away.") The tender - yet often creepy - is represented by two tales I can't stop thinking about: Martin Simpson's moving domestic ghost tale "Last Rites and Resurrections" and the slow burn of child fantasies gone sour in Micaela Morrissette's "The Familiars." 

There are also stories here that, to me, are undisputed masterpieces. These include:

• Michael Chabon's "The God of Dark Laughter". Brilliant combination of the paranoid with the weird, told with an impeccable literary voice.
• Jorge Luis Borges's examination of infinity in "The Aleph"
• Kafka's brilliant "In the Penal Colony"
• Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "The Hell Screen." Which turned me on to Akutagawa's brilliance (Jay Rubin's translation of this fantastical tale is the better version IMO).
  
• James Tiptree Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon), “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Terrible Things to Rats” 

Not every tale in the book was good, but then again, that's the greatest part about these collections. If you don't like one, wait a moment and the next one comes along. There were so many good stories in The Weird you won't be waiting long!

Thoughts on a few Comix and the Kindle Panel View

Most of the comics I’ve read over the last six months were on the Kindle reader.  The “Kindle Panel View” presents first the full page of the comic, and then you scroll through each of the individual panels on that page. It’s fascinating, and has both benefits and negatives. On one hand, it’s difficult to see the complete picture that all of the integrated panels construct – which can be a problem when reading Alan Moore comics, or comics where the layout contains unusual panels. On the other hand, zooming in on some of the smaller panels provides an intense focus on the brushwork details of the (for example, some of the amazing inking in the Swamp Thing's Floronic Man).  Overall, I still find myself wanting to read comix in their original format, but I imagine if I had a larger color screen I’d feel differently.


So what have I read? Let’s start off with the most recent: Saga of the Swamp Thing Book 1, which contains issues #20-27 of the series run, starting from when the imitable Alan Moore took over writing the story of this strange plant man. The first issue is a creepy but pretty straightforward closing of plot lines from the previous writer blatantly called “Loose Ends.” But with the next issue Moore started to put his stamp on the story, taking us into a trippy world where the Swamp Thing is more than just a cheesy monster but something of great power and beauty. Moore takes us on a journey, showing us how Swamp Thing realizes that the bio-restorative formula accident (a formula "that can make forests out of deserts") that that everyone thought  turned scientist Alec Holland into Swamp Thing in reality simply put Holland’s consciousness in some elemental plant-thing. (It’s much more interesting than I’m making it sound.) Despite the stories’ cosmic and epic nature, Moore's writing remains very human – giving us a depth of feeling and motivation behind most of the major characters in a way that most major label comics simply don’t have. Does it all work? No – cameos by the Justice League are strained, and the later issues where Swamp Thing confronts the bizarrely-clad demon Etrigan aren't nearly as moving as the issues without the rest of the DC Universe. Still, Moore’s immaculate pacing and creepy sensibility shine through, supported by Stephen Bisette and John Totleben’s detailed and creepy drawing. Their art - a strange mixture of awkwardness and twisted beauty – consists of lots of crosshatching flowing together in fascinating ways. It’s not at it’s best when depicting action sequences, or traditional “men-in-tights” superheros, but then that’s okay, since at it’s core this is a horror comic par excellence.

(As a side note, since I was reading this on the kindle it was black and white. I've since taken a look at the colored version on the iPad and it was a MUCH lesser experience IMO - the garish colors overwhelmed and took away from the mood and the beauty of the art. Be warned.)

Now the term "horror" is overused these days – it’s more of a genre description than a description of a feeling. Take Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, for example. Uzumaki  (“spiral” in Japanese) tells the tale of Kurôzu-cho, a Japanese town that is haunted by the pattern of the spiral and is touted as “a masterpiece of horror magna”. It’s a fantastic comic, one that’s genuinely creepy, disgusting, and macabre. But the book as a whole I can’t promote as true horror because the stories don’t combine to tell a complete tale. In reality, after the first few issues honest characters would have run screaming from the town, or crumbled into insanity under the weight of what they saw and their inability to escape it. But this is due partly to the episodic nature of monthly comix: Ito sets up his theme and explores it in inventive and genuinely creepy ways. (The man’s ability to generate genuinely horrific and disturbing images is uncanny.) But like weekly tv shows, the characters needed to be reset before each episode, or change so incrementally that they’re essentially the same. It's only as the series starts to reach its conclusion in the last few issues that it starts to really tell a cohesive tale. In short, despite many excellent moments, it doesn't have the depth of character to inspire the same levels of horror as Moore. But some of those images will just not leave my mind.

I should say that it's unfair to compare any other comics to Moore’s work. His ideas that span multiple issues or volumes seems to rise up out of him fully formed. For instance, check out Watchmen, and how single graphic frames in one issue will have powerful implications many issues down the road. Anotehr great example are the incredible multi-page spreads in Promethia where the art promotes the theme of the story while also moving forward the plot. In short, Moore thinks thematically while retaining a command of the details - a hard skill in any field, but one that is in short supply in comix.

Unless you also read Carla Speed McNeil's Finder, that is. She's the first comix artist since Moore that has impressed me with her thematic reach while being so impressive at a detailed level. (and I'm talking really detailed: check out the depth of thought revealed in the footnotes of her Finder Library volumes and you get a real sense for the amount of time and effort she's spent building up her world.) I have Volumes 1 & 2 and while I can’t say that I understand everything about it, she’s is simply a fantastic storyteller: both engaging & entertaining. What I love are the sheer profusion of bizarre details in her "aboriginal science fiction" – most of the stories take place in a far future where everyone lives in domed cities with fascinating technology, not all of which works (some details of maintenance have been lost to time). The main plotline is ostensibly about Jaegar, an aboriginal of some kind who can both track anyone (the Finder of the title) and serves as a “sin eater” (Wikipedia describes it as being a “ritual scapegoat” which I really like).  However, my favorite plot is Dream Sequence, where Magri White, a person who grows an extremely popular virtual reality in his head around which a successful corporation grows – but when White starts to lose his grip on reality, the people hooked on the world in his head start suffering strange and dramatic fates. The skill by which she weaves the effects of the big story together with the struggle in White’s life – and how she visually depicts White’s loosening grip on reality – is very complelling, to the point where I’ve revisited the story multiple times since it was first published in the late 2000s.

So other than the occasional Hellboy, that’s all of the comix I’ve been reading these days. What else should I be checking out?

Cross Posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

Modern Zombies

Can't say I'm a fan of The Walking Dead, but I do like me a good zombie movie. That's why I found this post so interesting:

Sara Davis conceives of the still life and the artistic portrayal of zombies as two forms of memento mori – a symbol of death’s inevitability:

For the 17th century Dutch merchant class, a still life was a shrine to the beauty and pleasure that money can buy: luxuries, delicacies, fine things that could be held in the hand or captured in oils, a small and fine possession in itself. But for contemporary society, the ultimate shrine and symbol of prosperity is the well-kept body — that is, a body that falls into a fairly narrow category of healthy, beautiful, and athletic. Despite all the goods and brands and tech toys, so much more of our collective wealth is sunk into sculpting or tightening, brightening or darkening, coloring and trimming, running, counting calories, and swallowing gallons of “smart” water. 

It makes sense, then, that today’s bogeyman and morality tale is a decaying body, a walking (or running) death’s head that all the cardio and training in the world can’t outrace. Zombies mock us, like the half-eaten fruits of the Dutch golden age and the weary speaker of Ecclesiastes, that though we may define ourselves by what and how we consume, it is all a pretty distraction from how we will be consumed.

An interesting take, no? I've always liked the "Zombies as a symbol of disease" idea, which is in line with the genre being a stylized reaction to our fear of death. What I haven't heard a good explanation for is why the sudden shift from the zombies of old, which slowly lurched around, to the newer zombies who can run and sprint and basically do everything a normal person can do. (Although I like Jeff Bryan's take: "When we're always gulping down caffeine and 5-hour energy tablets, that's going to have an effect on how we behave in our second life as zombies.") Perhaps it has something to do with the scary super viruses that seem to loom over our future...

Thoughts on H.P. Lovecraft

Any fan of horror fiction has heard of H.P. Lovecraft. It’s hard to overstate how much Lovecraft towers over modern horror writing – many authors like Stephen King sing his praises. It was this continued exposure to his name that led me to sample his writing. And you can do so for free! His fiction has passed out of copyright so people like CthulhuChick have provided his stories specifically designed for your e-reader of choice. (I love the internet.) And my first impression is that there’s a good reason for his reputation – he’s a compelling, original author that created insanely detailed worlds that, at times, are genuinely creepy. The liked the five (long) stories I read, although I felt that they all suffered from the same flaws that keep me from unequivably praising the man:

• Pacing. My god is the man long winded. I understand that writing was different back in the day and that authors liked to give things room to breathe, but his relaxed pacing is tough going in the internet age. 
• Words. All of the stories I read dealt with monsters or events that were so fantastic that they became sublime.  So how do you describe the indescribable? You overuse the words that are available to you - reading Lovecraft is like reading a thesaurus for “extraordinary” or “incredible.”
• Antiquated sensibility. Lovecraft quite obviously belonged to or longed for a bygone time when the world was divided into unrefined and refined people (the latter having servants and resources to travel the world and have sitting rooms and the free time to ponder architecture). This mindset is also foreign to the (my?) modern sensibility and also generates some quite offensive language about minorities.
• Unpronouncable names. I love the names he gives his monster menagerie but seriously, how do you say them? Can you pronounce “Cthulhu?” “Yog-sothoth”?

Regardless of the above, it’s speaks to the power of his writing that despite these significant flaws the stories are so good. My favorites were The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Mountains of Madness” and portions of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” IMO, “The Call of Cthulhu” is the place to start – it’s a short story that condenses what’s attractive about Lovecraft into a relatively taught package. On the other hand, “The Mountains of Madness”, despite its many moments of genius, suffers from its novella length and logical inconsistencies (to pick one: entire chapters are dedicated to a history of the monsters that our explorers apparently discerned in mere hours by examining wall etchings via flashlight. Brother, please.) It’s his endings that I liked the best. For example, once you get past the mind-numbing detail in the first sections of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” you get a riveting section where an explorer navigates the spooky tunnels underneath an old section of Providence RI.

Most people agree that there’s a sharp division in the horror genre – once Lovecraft came along, horror was simply different. And you can see this when you read him. Before Lovecraft, horror was mainly focused on danger to body or soul – things that would either kill you or would damn your soul to hell. Lovecraft depicts a world in which mankind is insignificant in the extreme, and the protagonists not only have a hard time grasping the cosmic nature of the beasts and plots raging around them but also the implication that these ageless monsters render us insignificant. I’m not sure what sparked this sensibility – a reaction to the World Wars or modern scientific discoveries – but the horror that defines human capabilities as insignificant in an indifferent universe is easily the most powerful aspect of his work.

Bonus video: Check out this (unembeddable) creepy video by Prins Preben inspired by Lovecraft.

The Cabin in the Woods

Watched The Cabin in the Woods last night. Holy crap. It's now one of my favorite horror movies, up there with The Silence of the Lambs and Alien and all of the other classics in my queue. I don't want to expand upon why the movie's so damned good - part of the enjoyment is the utter surprise of what happens - but I will say that the story is self-referential in a manner that is respectful of its subject matter (horror movies in general) while still acknowledging the absurdity of it all. And done in such a way that it's still scary too!

As Jamie Frevele puts it on The Mary Sue:

"It’s awesome because it’s incredibly effective and well-done. The script, by [Joss] Whedon and Drew Goddard, who also directed, is just spot-on and clever, while also being scary and gory without being gratuitously violent. (It is, after all, slasher movie at heart.) One-dimensional characters are given depth and reasons for being there besides dying. Every scene has a purpose. Everything works beautifully in The Cabin in the Woods, and by the time it’s over, you can’t believe what you have just been through. It’s a movie that happens to you, because it hits you over the head with its sexy, beautiful brains."

IMO, I love the playing of horror movie paradigms in the same manner of Bill Willingham's Fables or some of Neil Gaiman does with fairy tales - by combining characters from different stories together and watching the fireworks. Good stuff!

First Line of "The Strain"

""Once upon a time," said Abraham Setrakian’s grandmother, "there was a giant."

- Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, from "The Strain," an addictive horror book. I'm 162 pages and the slow burn of the beginning is just about to boil over. It's an excellent horror novel, containing a lot of good writing like this:

"That was strange. She was spooked now. Majorly spooked. Dwarfed by a massive, $250-million, 383-ton flying machine, she had a fleeting yet palpable and cold sensation of standing in the presence of a dragon-like beast. A sleeping demon only pretending to be asleep, yet capable, at any moment, of opening its eyes and it's terrible mouth. An electrically psychic moment, a chill running through her with the force of a reverse orgasm, everything tightening, knotting up." p. 17.

The problem with a lot of these horror books is that once the plot begins in earnest, the relative restraint of the beginning becomes overwrought both in terms of events and prose. Here's hoping this doesn't occur here!

The New Horror in Short Stories

...I was beat. Arguing with the children, a trip to the dentist, then endless shopping for invisible things--toilet paper, glue, salt. Things no one ever knows are there until they're gone and are then needed desperately. An invisible day where you exhaust yourself running around, doing thankless errands that are necessary but meaningless: the housewife's oxymoron.

- Jonathan Carroll, "The Sadness of Detail", page 207 of Poe's Children.

Poe's Children is a compilation of what editor Peter Straub labels the "New Horror" - authors that strive to escape the ghettos of typical horror fiction in favor of "literature" (or at least genre mixing). Like all short story anthologies, not all of the stories are successful, even if they all are variations of a theme. So far, the ones that  work for me are the ones that provoke a visceral reaction - either of horror, disgust, or wonder. To me, that's what horror as a genre is all about - lifting you out of he mundane world Carroll describes so aptly above. For example, Kelly Link's “Louise’s Ghost” is a story that's certainly interesting and has a fun conceit - the entire story is about two women both named Louise so it's difficult to tell who is doing or saying what for a while - but it didn't present any wow moments to me (unlike the other stories she presented in Stranger Things Happen). No, the strongest stories here either shock like Dan Chaon's “The Bees” (a truly disturbing tale of supernatural redemption) or present a situation to you in an entirely new way like Carroll's story or Elizabeth Hand's “Cleopatra Brimstone” (the best story i've read in 2001, hands down).

Still only halfway through the book, but so far it's half hits, half misses. A pretty good showing in my book. Hey, hitting .500 would win you the batting title and $250 million dollars, so Straub did something right!

Cross Posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox

Best Man Cave Ever

The New Yorker visits Guillermo del Toro's collection of monsters. It's an interesting examination of what goes into making these fantastic creations, even if you have to get past the piles and piles of New Yorker smug. Oh, and I'd totally see this:

The movie that he most longs to make is an adaptation of a grandly ridiculous H. P. Lovecraft novella, “At the Mountains of Madness,” in which explorers, venturing into Antarctica, discover malevolent aliens in a frozen, ruined city. Some of the aliens mutate wildly, which would allow del Toro to create dozens of extreme incarnations. He said, “If I get to do it, those monsters will be so terrifying.”

High Tension and the Importance of Good Sound

Watched High Tension this weekend and was very impressed. High quality Horror film! What I liked so much about it (and the other “realistic” horror movies I’ve seen recently, like Open Water and The Descent) is that the people in the movies mainly act like normal people. They don’t go wandering off by themselves into the darkness, and there’s a distinct lack of "red shirts" . This (relative: we are talking horror films here) realism draws you into the story and makes you more emotionally involved in the story, whereas bad horror films (like Cabin Fever, to name a recent example) that don’t have this attachment, are the ones that lead in unintentional comedy. I wasn’t personally sold by the plot twist, but it was fun, and I sure has hell didn’t see it coming. The whole movie is helped out by the easy-on-the-eyes protagonist Cécile de France.

The other thing I realized as I watched the movie is how important sound design is to horror films, or any films that hope to build up the tension. In horror movies in particular, there often isn’t a lot of action as one of the victims is hiding from a killer, or is staring in shock at something horrible that has occurred, or is witnessing a horrible death, and if the sounds are not just right, the whole thing loses its power. For instance, in High Tension, there are several brutal murders that take place in almost absolute silence, and so the sounds that the director chose for the eviscerations are the ones that really drive home the event to you.

House of 1000 Corpses

Watched Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses last night. What a creepy movie. While - thank god - not the most graphically gory movie I've ever seen, it was still gross enough to make you squirm. And like all horror movie, the plot was an absurd clothes hanger for the images. But that's where the strength of the movie lay; the images were memorable, amazing, disturbing, and unforgettable. Zombie creates a lot of image collages from old movies, random soundtracks, and negative images and splices these into the movie - a distancing effect, to be sure, but it really provided an eerie, industrial-mood to the whole thing that ended up being more disturbing then any straight-up presentation would have done.

However, to me, the most effective scare tactic was the complete amorality of the characters. No irony nor camp for these villains, the glee they showed in pursuing the death of a few of the eponymous corpses was truly disturbing, and why I'll be looking for the sequel in the near future.