After loving the first season, I never really got around the second or third of Doom Patrol. K and I did have a false start where we watched a handful of episodes, but honestly, I barely remember anything about it. So I started up from the beginning of Season 2 this week, and I'm once again in love with this fantastically mad adaptation/distillation of (mostly) Grant Morrison's six-volume run on the C-Building X-Men.
Read:
After savoring it for over ten years, I finally finished Ramsey Campbell's definitive collection Alone With the Horrors.
This collection was curated by the author himself, so it represents the stories from his early career that he feels are his finest. It's dense, perhaps because a lot of the oldest stories in here, hailing from as far back as the early 60s when Campbell first began to write, read verbose in a way that often feels unnecessary. That said, all the imagery and all the concepts here are fantastic. As the collection goes on, however, you begin to discover some absolute short fiction gems among these pages. Of particular note for me were
Man in the underpass
The Depths
Down There
The Hands
Again
Seeing the World
The Other Side
Boiled Alive
End of the Line
That last one is nothing like it sounds like it would be. Campbell actually wrote the forward to this edition and talks briefly about how Boiled Alive is his attempt at Science Fiction. All of these are extremely British and characterized by solitude, rain, and a general social malignancy that fits with the Britain I've gotten to know through the New Wave British Comic writers of the late 70s-mid 80s. Likewise, the final story in this volume, End of the Line, feels about as close as a writer ever got to demonstrating literal madness in prose. A freaky and fantastic journey into a mind seriously deluded by knowing nothing of the world except the religion foisted upon him by a father that never let him leave the house and taught him everything in the world outside the window is evil. Now imagine that person having to go outside for the first time by themselves.
Chilling.
Playlist:
Steve Moore - The Mind's Eye OST
The Thirsty Crows - Hangman's Noose
Revocation - Teratogenesis
Plague Bringer - Life Songs in a Land of Death
Bret Easton Ellis Podcast - S6E21: Platinum Patreon Q&A
Clint Mansell & Kevin Kiner - Doom Patrol: Season 1 OST
Deafheaven - Sunbather
Ghost Bath - Moonlover
Deafheaven - Infinite Granite
Deafheaven - From the Kettle Onto the Coil (Single)
Deafheaven - Black Brick (Single)
Card:
A quick Pull from Missi's Raven deck to bring me into the weekend:
A reminder to remember my equilibrium.
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