by Justin Evans (2007)

Psychiatry and demonic possession collide brilliantly in Justin Evans’s debut thriller, A Good and Happy Child. Partially set in modern day New York, where a young father is seeking help for the crippling fear of loving his baby son and partially set in that man’s youth spent in a Virginia college town, the novel swings back and forth between adulthood and childhood; faith and reason – Evans’s greatest achievement is that you can enjoy the book no matter where your personal beliefs fall.

The back of the paperback would lead you to draw comparisons to The Exorcist and The Little Friend,  but I consider those masterpieces, and A Good and Happy Child didn’t draw me in quite as much – still, it’s well written, often tense and would, in the right hands, make for a pretty great movie in the tradition of The Omen. Imagine character actor extraordinaire Tom Noonan as Tom Harris.

Evans did a lot of research on cases of demon possession and drew from his own childhood in Virginia growing up with a belief in and experiences with ghosts to create a rich story that is leaps and bounds above your average demon filled paperback out for quick and easy thrills. Well worth the five years it took to write. I look forward to reading more by this author.

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Posted on January 10, 2010

by Felt (2005)

I’m not rap unfriendly exactly, but my list of favorite hip hop songs is not a terribly long one. I love Gravediggaz, Eazy-E and Doctor Octagon with the rest of you, and now I can add Felt, or at least their ode to blue collar working girls, Dirty Girl to the list. Slug and Murs, who make up Felt, are underground rappers which means I’ve never heard of any of their previous collaborations or projects, though I am curious.

The joyfully lustful Dirty Girl is just so fun to listen to and any song that can talk about shopping for the best veggie burgers in town, not knowing how to change your motor oil and the eroticism of hair nets and dripping mascara is aces in my book.

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Posted on January 10, 2010

by Sam Lipsyte (2005)

Home Land is a bitter and acidically funny book about a smart-assed failure named Lewis (also known, after an unfortunate high school incident, as “Teabag”), who, via his high school’s alumni newsletter, decides to tell his former classmates (many of whom seem to personify success and adult contentedness while Lewis spends his time doing little more than loafing around with his friend Gary, a guy who has got some issues of his own – to put it lightly), exactly what is on his mind: to broadcast the inner life of someone who “did not pan out”.

As an anti-hero, Lewis isn’t particularly likable – but then again, no one in this novel is likable. But likability was not a hindrance in my enjoyment of the book, though its cleverness almost was. Home Land nearly suffers from ultra quick witted writing (think Juno) that, while fun to read, sometimes left me wondering how it was possible that everyone in the book’s universe could be so quirky.

Author Sam Lipsyte won a Believer Book Award for Home Land and it earned a spot on the Times Notable Books of 2005.

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Posted on December 26, 2009

directed by Andrea Arnold (2006)

Few films manage to sustain tension and suspense as well as Red Road, a thriller that causes the viewer to continually wonder what’s exactly is going on, manages to. Jackie is a security camera operator in a very, very bleak housing estate of Glasgow (can’t imagine the Scotland tourism board endorsing this one) who observes the people around her at a distance without their knowledge. One night, she is shaken by a face she recognizes on her screen.

Most of the film is fueled by the constant surprises. Who is this man, and what is his relationship to Jackie? Why was she so upset at the sight of him, yet he doesn’t know her face? As in any thriller built around a tower of questions, the answers are not always as fulfilling as the asking, but in this case, the reveal changes the entire tone and message of the movie. Thought you were simply going to get scared and see some vengeance? Try a totally raw sex scene (the closest I’ve seen to realistic doing it on film in some time) and redemption. I have to admit, it initially turned me a bit off until I accepted that it was a different film than I expected.

But to say Red Road is merely a sum of its plot elements is unfair. Through the dogme techniques, director Andrea Arnold paints a very tactile and realistic world. She manages to make not only sex, but parties, breakdowns, bars, and fights feel like you’ve just stumbled into them. Quite a feat for a directorial debut.

The movie is available on netflix instant, a great way to discover films you might otherwise never hear about.

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Posted on December 13, 2009

Airing weekly on SYFY

Let me just start off by making it clear that Ghost Hunters is a show that, unless you’ve seen it, you really can’t believe it. If you’ve seen clips on the Soup where a traditionally good looking guy is, in the parlance of McHale’s writers, “taunting the air”, that show is not Ghost Hunters but the free-wheeling, tongue-in-cheek Zak Bagans of Ghost Adventures. Ghost Hunters, which airs on the newly branded SyFy, is a dour, sour, extremely self-serious program that follows the TAPS team (former RotoRooters – I kid you not, watch the animated intro) Jason and Grant as they travel the country proffering their special blend of dickish skepticism.

I’m not sure how to put this without sounding like a dick myself (I’d certainly like to suppose that I’m not without a base-level belief in the supernatural), but a television show about the (pseudo) science of ghost detection is, at its very core, problematic. I suppose what I have the biggest issue with is the way that a bunch of scowly douchebags have thoroughly stripped away the mystery and wonder of the spiritual realm and replaced it with a bunch of hard and fast rules they simply shat out over years and years of know-it-ally conversations. Ghost stories are always fundamentally people stories: once you’re dead, you can’t really do all that much – it’s the human element that makes tales of spookings and hauntings so compelling – and Ghost Hunters occasionally succeeds when it profiles individuals experiencing paranormal activity in their homes and places of business.

The interviews with the afflicted are always the most genuinely interesting parts of the show because, more often than not, the interview subjects cannot help but betray that the haunting is something that they’re kind of proud of, a fact that sparks a series of essential, and rather heavy, human experience questions: why do these people think they have ghosts in their lives, what’s going on psychologically? Why aren’t all of us affected by moving plates and dimming lights, bumps in the attic and visions of people not there? Ultimately: is there really an afterlife or are we doomed to haunt some tourist attraction for the rest of eternity?

After the interview and case history are established, a  bunch of DV cams, EMF detectors and rigid, jerky attitudes take center stage as the team tries to ‘scientifically’ establish whether or not the place is actually haunted. This ‘evidence gathering’ phase of the show is always tedious, once it’s completed the team studies the A/V record they’ve made and looks for pieces of the tape where they can almost detect a voice straining to say something like, ‘Help me”.

But I filed this under Brittany’s Laughs category for a reason: this show is hilarious.

Click here for the rest of Ghost Hunters Academy

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Posted on December 6, 2009