New Music from Ben Frost!

I've been loosely following Ben Frost since 2009's By the Throat. I cheered for him when he landed the score to Dark - one of my all-time favorite shows. I didn't realize he had a new record coming out, but now that I've heard Scope Neglect, it's almost certainly going to make my favorites of the year list, just strictly based on how absolutely different it is from everything else he's done. 

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Watch:

I am happy to report that Andrew Lobel and Michael Mohan's Immaculate is a fantastic time at the theatre, and I absolutely love and adore them and the studio for releasing this one Easter weekend! What do the dissenters say about that?

Well, that's a bit much. Not sure a movie could ever be *ahem* pure evil, but then, these people are prone to embellishment, yes? Either way, I very much enjoyed this one and put up a new episode of The Horror Vision Presents: Blood & Coffee on it.

I'm developing the Blood & Coffee series as a series of short, spoiler-free video reviews I can knock out by myself when the other members of the show are indisposed or not interested in the flick. I think Immaculate is getting a bit of resistance from the Horror Community simply based on Sydney Sweeney, however, as I talk about in the review, she was instrumental in this one getting made, so while I'm not about to sit through a lot of what she's been in so far, she's A-OK in my book.

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Read:

I finished Malcolm Devlin's And Then I Woke Up on Saturday. Fantastic book. Reminded me a lot of David Moody's Hater.

And Then I Woke Up is a really interesting angle on the now pretty saturated Zombie/Hate Virus trope, and definitely feels like it breathes some fresh life into the subgenre. If you're a fan of those types of stories, give this one a go. I think you'll dig. Reiterating a hearty "Thank You!" to my Horror Vision co-host Ray for gifting me this one. 

Next up: A re-read of Ivy Tholen's Tastes Like Candy, which I read for the first time last year and LOVED. Imagine my delight when, a few weeks ago, Ms. Tholen announced a sequel is heading our way on April 22nd!

Couldn't be more excited about this one!!!

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Playlist:

Ben Frost - Scope Neglect

Zombi - Direct Inject

Money Mark - Mark's Keyboard Repair

Miranda Sex Garden - Carnival of Souls

Man Man - Life Fantastic

Local Natives - Gorilla Manor

Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food

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Card:

Back to Aleister Crowley and Lady Freida Harris's Thoth deck for the Pull today:

• Ace of Disks

• X: Fortune

• VI: The Lovers

The struggle against the process of monetary enlightenment is difficult, but not without reward. Lean on someone else. 

Tastes Like Candy

For reasons that will be obvious to anyone who watched the Yellowjackets season two finale this past Friday. I've already posted The Horror Vision's discussion on youtube and all streaming platforms. Crazy good and this song was a perfect choice to end the episode and season. 

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Watch:

I finally watched Huesera: The Bone Woman the other day. Pretty solid flick. I ended up wanting a bit more in the story department, however, filmmakers rarely go wrong giving us less instead of more. This is the slowest of the slow burns but is peppered with some genuinely freaky moments and images, chief among them the giant Mary statue at the start of the film (you see a bit of it in the teaser below, but that doesn't quite do the scene justice).

 

Directed by Michelle Garza Cervera, Huesera: The Bone Woman is streaming on Shudder and well worth your time, when you're in the mood for a film that settles in and slowly turns up the heat. 

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Read:

Last week, I finished Chuck Palahniuk's The Invention of Sound. I would recommend this one to any old-school Palahniuk fan or new reader interested in his work. This is classic form Palahniuk - The Invention of Sound reads exactly the way I remember Choke, Lullaby, Diary reading when I first started seeking the author's work out in the late 90s/early 00s. That might be a bad thing if you've just recently read a bunch of his work, however, if you're like me and haven't read anything he's written in a while, this will remind you of what you loved about his older books. 

I've always thought the key to Palahniuk is not reading a bunch of his books in a row. Not an easy thing to do when they move so quick and have such propulsive style and ideas. However, there seems to be a law of diminishing returns if you binge his stuff, or at least there is for me and quite a few other fans I've spoken to about this over the years. Anyway, none of that should be taken as criticism; I love the man's work and I love this book.

After finishing that, I was set to go into a re-read of Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is a Chainsaw as prep to then read the recently released sequel, Don't Fear the Reaper, however, something drew me to a novel my good friend Jesus had sent me quite some time ago, Ivy Tholen's Tastes Like Candy.

This book is fantastic! A slasher novel that revolves around a group of incoming Senior girls at a Texas High School who get picked off one-by-one in an closed carnival. I blew through Tastes Like Candy in four days, and it really only took me that long because I had friends in from out of town for the holiday weekend. My Goodreads review is HERE, however, suffice it to say here that this fit right in with all the other well-known authors I've been reading this year. Great stuff! The author's website is HERE if you want to check out her work.

         

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Playlist:

The Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives

Dir En Grey - The Marrow of a Bone

Queens of the Stone Age - Emotion Sickness (pre-release single)

Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris

The Effigies - Remains Unknowable

David Bowie - Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks)

Ozzy Osbourne - Patient No. 9

X - Los Angeles

Blut Aud Nord - Disharmonium: Undreamable Abysses

Druids - Shadow Work

Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age

Trombone Shorty - For True

            

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

 

• Knight of Cups - Controlling Emotion with Will

• Two of Pentacles - Earthly Partnership

• Three of Swords - Growth of conflict or complex relationship

As always, keep in mind the interpretations I lay down for individual cards are a combination of grimoire research strained through personal circumstance. That said, I'm fairly certain this is reminding me of my current project (again), which has been on the backburner over the long weekend while friends were in. I have a fairly complex legal/business relationship in the novel, and I really need to work that out before proceeding.

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