Sometimes it feels like the world has been ending forever.
But hey, who’s been around that long? So let’s begin again... a little less expansively, perhaps. In recent years, at least—in fiction and in film; in video games, comic books and on TV too—there has been an interest in the apocalypse that borders, if you ask me, on the obscene. A fascination has emerged fully fledged, an obsession if you will—and for some folks it is exactly that—with how the world will end, and what, if anything, could come after.
For children, Halloween means plastic spiders, child-sized witches hats, and orange colored candy lurking around the corner of just about every store. Soon they’ll be gone (costumes packed away and handmade ghosts put to rest until next year), but there’s one bit of spooky fun that’s never out of season, especially with the elementary school crowd.
There was a time when one writer more than any other seemed to capture the darker side of the imaginations of a generation of young male readers, and on a vast scale too. A writer that dealt with the taboo, pushed boundaries, felt dangerous to read, was scorned by the consensus of literary respectability, but whose name was a byword for action, thrills, and sensational storytelling.
Out of all of Stephen King’s books, the one I read over and over again in high school was ‘Salem’s Lot, and why not: VAMPIRES TAKE OVER AN ENTIRE TOWN! Could there be a more awesome book in the entire world? And it’s not just me. King himself has said that he’s got “a special cold spot in my heart for it,” and without a doubt it’s the bunker buster of the horror genre, a title that came along with the right ambitions at the right time and broke things wide open.
There's a nasty flu going round. An epidemic, they call it. The posters say to cover your mouth when you sneeze, and throw away the tissue. But such simple measures won't stop this flu. Because when you catch the flu, armed police come and lock you in your house to die alone. When you catch this flu, it kills you in days. And when you catch this flu, two hours after it's killed you, your eyelids snap open again.
People praising Stephen King sometimes chalk his popularity up to the way he tells a story. They say that he’s all about the plot, driving it ahead like a runaway train, keeping his readers hooked on the narrative until the very last page. They talk about how you just can’t put his books down, about how they kept turning pages to find out what happened next.
The cast and crew of Carrie appeared on a much-anticipated panel at New York Comic Con this past weekend, and the first thing everyone wanted to know about was blood.
October is a chilly season for science fiction. The sleek surfaces of spaceship chrome and bright glow of laser-blades don’t lend themselves to the shadows we crowd around at a time of year we celebrate the nostalgic darkness and lurking mysteries of a bygone age when we knew a lot less than we do now.
