I’m writing this from the Vancouver airport. I’m taking my last big trip of the year - six days spent in the Canadian Yukon. There will be snowmobiling, ice fishing, and - if lucky - a chance to see the Northern Lights.
Provided I don’t get eaten by a Yeti, I’ll have some fun stories to share in next week’s newsletter but - for now - I want to hit you, my friends, with some quick shot recommendations:
GODZILLA MINUS ONE
Yes, all your kaiju-loving friends have probably already spent the last week breathlessly beating their chests about this latest big-screen Godzilla adventure from Toho Studios. But guess what? They’re right. GODZILLA MINUS ONE is a thoroughly solid film - full of emotional pathos, stirring adventure, and (checks notes) a big-ass monster tearing shit up.
That is, after all, what audiences go to see when it comes to Godzilla films. With the release of Toho’s new film, the newly-released trailer for GODZILLA X KONG, and AppleTV’s MONARCH: LEGACY OF MONSTERS, we are living in a golden age of giant monsters and I couldn’t be happier. Giant monsters are the pasta of pop culture - you can do anything with them. I love the silly stomp-a-minute joy of Showa-era Godzilla films, I love the political mundanity of SHIN GODZILLA, I love the environmental messages smuggled in GODZILLA VS THE SMOG MONSTER and the thinly-veiled “Jason Statham vs Godzilla” backdoor pitch that was IDW’s GODZILLA 2012 comic book series. You can tell just about any kind of story with Godzilla. One day, if we’re lucky, we’ll get a Godzilla musical.
GODZILLA MINUS ONE attempts something a bit more self-serious than what Legendary is currently doing with their big and small-screen American Godzilla adventures. The movie picks up in the aftermath of World War II and sees a country rise up to try and protect what little they have left from a giant radioactive dinosaur with a hard-on for eating humans. And Godzilla sure does seem to be a dinosaur in GODZILLA MINUS ONE. In the opening scene of the film, a Kamakazi pilot left stranded on Odo Island witnesses a giant (but not as giant) monster rise out of the sea to eat the Air Force mechanics stationed there. This version of Godzilla is about the size of your typical T-Rex - big, but not so big you couldn’t hurt it with a pickup truck. But, as dinosaurs are wont to do, this Godzilla is promptly irradiated during nuclear testing and grows to gargantuan size.
I like my Godzillas big - really, really, really big. I think there’s something absolutely terrifying about a creature so big that it doesn’t even register the tiny humans at its feet. To go from being the human that strides upon ants without thought or consideration to having to run from a creature that is clearly leagues ahead of you on the food chain is not something humanity has ever had to deal with … yet. What’s scarier than a Godzilla standing over you, though? A Godzilla so huge that you can see it coming from miles away. At that point, the monster transcends physical terror (and trust me, giant monsters know a thing or two when it comes to physical terror) and becomes a force of nature. You can’t reason with a flood. You can’t stop a hurricane. All you can do is try and protect yourself as much as possible from the force’s path. But here’s the thing - once you know hurricanes and tornadoes and monsters taller than the tallest skyscraper exist, you have to just live with that knowledge - aware that you are but a speck of insignificance in the face of the universe’s whims.
Godzilla, ladies and gentlemen is here after all to remind us that history shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.
Go, go Godzilla.
BLACKWATER by Michael McDowell
I spent the majority of November reading this absolute chunk of a novel. Originally serialized as six novels in the early ‘80s, this epic follows a family in Alabama who, after a biblical flood, find themselves introduced to a new woman in town. This woman has her eyes set on the family’s eligible bachelor son and, with true expediency about things, finds herself soon married into the family and battling with the young man’s overbearing mother for familiar dominance. Oh, and this new blushing bride just happens to be a river monster.
BLACKWATER is very much a soap opera that occasionally remembers it’s a horror novel. There are gruesome murders and ghosts and lots of death and destruction but what kept me chugging through the book’s 800 pages is the family drama and societal intrigue. At one point while reading I actually audibly gasped, “Oh, no she didn’t!”
Literature!
I never really was much for soap operas or telenovelas but something about BLACKWATER brought out the drama lover in me. I was thrilled as weddings and childbirths were lobbed with strategic accuracy - planned and executed between rival family members as they clambered to claw their way up the family crest. Oh, sure - I loved the river monster carnage too, but it was the characters that I fell in love with.
Maybe because the book was so long - definitely because of how well written it was - I found myself mourning the fact that I wouldn’t spend more time with the characters after I had finished the book. That’s a sign of a powerful story and a feeling I’ve only experienced a handful of times before.
I honestly can’t explain why I found myself as engrossed with the book as I did - it’s 100 percent not the kind of book I would normally read so eagerly. As I pulled up Goodreads reviews for the book, though, I found a lot of readers expressing similar sentiments. There’s just something hypnotic about the book - effortlessly captivating and utterly unlike anything else you’ll ever read. I cannot recommend BLACKWATER enough - especially if you ever watched an episode of DYNASTY and found yourself thinking how much better the show would be if it starred the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
THE OVERLOOKED by Simon Oré Molina
Molina’s delightfully brief novel is ostensibly a children’s book, written from the perspective of the Grady Twins, the two little dead girls who haunt the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s THE SHINING and Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation. With THE OVERLOOKED, Molina attempts to bridge King and Kubrick’s legendarily terrifying tales of snowbound terror with the equally dark (in its own way) style of Roald Dahl.
Teddy and Hellen Grady spend their days playing in and around the Overlook Hotel - trapped in a state of suspended childhood after their father chopped them into little bits. They aren’t lonely though - the hotel is filled with dead people, after all. Molina cleverly inserts the various ghosts that pop up in THE SHINING (both the book and its big-screen adaptation) and imbues them with personality and drive. Even the elevator of blood gets a backstory!
While the Grady Twins aren’t the only ghosts in the Overlook, they do wish they had a fellow child to play with. Thus, when they start to see a mysterious blonde boy playing around the hotel, they go on a hunt to learn as much as they can about who he is and how they can get him to stay at the hotel forever and ever.
The book is wickedly funny but I was surprised with just how much emotional weight Molina managed to smuggle into his elevated fan-fiction. There are moments of profound sadness in THE OVERLOOKED that caught me completely by surprise.
The book is not for kids but adults will appreciate the spot-on approximation of chapter book prose that Molina conjures for his novel. It feels like a book you would have checked out of the school library growing up, but with a whole of fuck-ton more curse words.
As a general rule, I don’t tend to read fan fiction. THE OVERLOOKED has shown me the error of my ways. It’s smart, it’s touching, and it both pokes fun at the source material while also weirdly elevating the original story in its own tongue-in-cheek way.
It’s a great read and I only wish I was brave enough of an uncle to give it to my nephews and nice this Christmas.