Isolation: Day 180

 

I pulled out Firewater's classic 1998 album The Ponzi Scheme and, as usual, now find myself unable to put it away. I've posted other songs from this album here before but haven't paid tribute to others. In that interest, here's"So Long Superman," just another of my favorite songs on an album where every song is a favorite.

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Read: 

I finished John Ajvide Lindqvist's Handling the Undead a few days ago. Wow. Very good. Understated, powerful, and creepy as hell. Lindqvist's prose is a touch dry, but it works well as he filters between the three main groups of characters - three families - and how they react to the return of dead loved ones. Their reactions then become superimposed across a larger arena as the whole of Sweden reacts to the return of what the media dub the "Reliving," a term very much inspired by a government trying to handle a baffling and unprecedented experience. This is an undead book where the undead are, for the most part, completely unviolent, leaving the characters to deal with the psychological, emotional, and sociological ramifications of what would happen if the recently deceased returned to us.

From there I moved back into Nathan Ballingrud's debut short story collection, North American Lake Monsters. I'd been reading a story here or there over the last two weeks, just to have something to dig into that inspires me to write, and now that I'm full bore, I'm once again in Ballingrud's beautiful prose. This man is easily one of the best writers working today, no need for the genre quantifier. I simply cannot wait for this to hit Hulu next month as the new anthology show Monsterland; I'm hoping they do all nine stories. In particular, The Crevasse is one of the best shorts I've ever read, and to see it properly translated would be majestic, in the least.

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Playlist: 

Firewater - The Ponzi Scheme

Mastodon - Crack the Skye

Mastodon - Emperor of Sand

Perturbator - Dangerous Days

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Card: 

"Harmonious union of male and female energies" is a nice reminder on something I've been working on as I muster up the gumption to jump back into Shadow Play, which I continue to avoid for some reason.