If batrock.net was a paid outlet, Lot would likely be given to a queer person of colour to review. As this is a one man outfit, that’s not an option, but this review of Lot will attempt to tackle the stories contained within this collection without the air of tourism or gentrification.

Short stories, that publishing bastion which was once dominated by genre and feared by book vendors, are suddenly commercially viable. Between Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black and Bryan Washington’s Lot, the form is receiving a renaissance of public attention. Lot itself is a stunning debut collection that asks the reader what constitutes a collection of short stories and what makes up a loose novel, when every story shares the same neighbourhood and most of them the same narrator. Regardless of its taxonomy, Lot is a book worth more than dipping into.

People who dismiss the idea of literature, both modern and classic, tend to view it as variants on a single story: a middle-aged man grappling with the perceived failures of his life seeks solace in the arms of a much younger woman. This is often further reduced to a professor and student dynamic. In Stay Up With Hugo Best, Erin Somers flips the script with the concept “what if that alleged classic literary had its script flipped: the exact same story from the perspective of the woman”. The thing is that it’s exactly the same. A woman ineffectually tries to save a boring but overly wealthy man from himself. Without finesse or an actual point of difference, Stay Up With Hugo Best doesn’t work.

You don’t have to always follow your heroes through the gates of Hell. If Indiana Jones asks you to step into the Temple of Doom with him, you say “no thank you, Mister Jones. Call me when you’re looking for the cup of a carpenter, I want something a bit less imperialist.” This is a laboured metaphor already, but it turns out that Danse Macabre, Stephen King’s first non-fiction effort,is full of them. And “heh heh” asides. And blatant errors — Peter Pan and the “Wild Boys”, “Anarchy for the U.K.” — that have not been corrected in thirty years of reprints.

It’s not a case of don’t meet your heroes, but rather a case of “the past is a different country, you weren’t born yet, and nothing in this book means anything to you”. Danse Macabre does not hold up to a modern reader, dealing as it does with works that have largely been obscured by time, none of which have endured like the output of its author. Scrappy, and written with a giant chip on its shoulder, Danse Macabre is a curio.

Stephen King is in a constant state of adaptation renaissance. For this reader and viewer’s money, Pet Sematary 1989 was a slavishly faithful adaptation of the novel, keeping all of the content but missing out on the soul. You can safely say this 30 years after the event, but the child actors weren’t up to much, either. (And Dale Midkiff barely got any work again)

Pet Sematary 2019 is a different beast entirely. It has the bones of the story right, and it changes things up. An esteemed colleague postulated that when it makes these changes for its climax, Pet Sematary becomes “just a horror movie.” A pet theory around these parts is that King’s works often lose much in the translation from page to screen due to the novels’ inherent interiority of character.

Despite all of that, Pet Sematary is a fair shake at some of King’s more challenging and troubling thematic work. The changes make Pet Sematary more enjoyable than its literary counterpart because we lose the intense nihilism of the original incarnation. The misery may have been the point, but this new movies shows that sometimes you want a bit of an undead sting instead.

Read the review of Pet Sematary at Trespass.

If the measure of a movie is how much you think about it afterwards, Us is the finest film of 2019. It’s the sort of movie that rewards repeat viewing, because it is packed with details that you’re guaranteed not to pick up on the first time around.

The following review isn’t entirely accurate: it claims that Us is largely humourless. This was written through the haze of the sheer anxiety and panic that a first run through can provoke in someone (ie me) trying to grasp exactly what is happening. It’s pretty funny at times, and not just because it has Tim Heidecker in it.

More than that, Us is a painstakingly constructed film that contains elements of horror, but realistically it’s a complete experience, drawing from many different sources to become a cohesive and disturbing hole. You can take it at face value, but to give it even a little thought, you’ll be chewing on it for a long time thereafter.

Read the full review of Us on Trespass.

There was a time when George RR Martin was a somewhat prolific writer. Before he was sitting on a large pile of money and an even larger writer’s block, Martin wrote a little bit of everything: short stories about psychic rats; novels about Southern vampires long before Sookie Stackhouse; a fantasy history of a fake band. Nightflyers is his psychic science fantasy horror novella. 

We, as a society, are rapidly closing in on Avengers: Endgame. The movie designed to bridge that gap is set in 1995, crammed with nostalgia that its lead character is incapable of feeling. It even has snippets lifted directly from Top Gun.

Brie Larson, able though she may be, does not carry Captain Marvel alone. Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury gets a leading role, and Ben Mendelsohn performs a career highlight underneath a sea of makeup and prosthetics.

Read the full review of Captain Marvel at Trespass.