As part of its 31 Days of Horror October blogathon, Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Adam Balz reviews Who Can Kill a Child?, a Eurohorror children-run-amok flick cited by Eli Roth in his defense of a scene that deigned to answer that question in Hostel Part II.

As part of his 31 Days of Zombie! October blogathon, Rob Humanick gives 28 Weeks Later the “one of horror’s recent best” props it richly deserves.

Shoot the Projectionist invites you to submit your nominees for 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies.

Snarkerati presents its list of the Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time.

Moviefone counts down its list of the 31 Best Horror Movies of All Time.

Facets Features is rolling out 31 Days of Horror Clips.

Links via The Horror Blog, My New Plaid Pants, Infocult, GreenCine Daily, and my own bad self.

The term “comics fans” gets a lot of static because of how it frames the comics audience’s relationship with the medium, or more specifically the superhero segment of it, in uncritical, boosterish terms. It’s a descriptor that, when deployed a certain way, is seen to cut off critical thinking in favor of the “what’s the shocking secret behind Supergirl’s origin?” level of engagement with the work. To the extent that criticism is present it tends to be of the “Wolverine would never say that” variety–in other words, it’s surface-level, concerned with plot and dialogue and whether characters look a certain accepted way rather than the formal aspects of the comic–and it tends to be offered as pressure to get things back on the right track, at which point the fandom can continue unabated. Plus, it’s a little strange linguistically: No one ever says “I’m a prose fan,” that sort of thing. For these reason I try to avoid calling the audience for comic books “comics fans” unless I’m deliberately referring to the segment of that audience that does look at comics in that way. I use “reader” rather than “fan” in other cases.

On the other hand, calling myself a “comics reader” is a woefully inadequate way to describe my relationship with the medium, which has a passion and a depth (whether or not that’s a good or bad thing) that a neutral word like “reader” doesn’t even come close to conveying. I’d no more think of myself as simply a “comics reader” than I would a “music listener” or “film viewer,” and I doubt many people who engage with any of those art forms would either. It would be disingenuous to suggest that I’m not a comics fan (or a rock nerd or a movie buff or a horror fanatic, for that matter). It’s probably a safe bet that anyone who’s felt moved to write about their opinions on comics (in particular or in general) is in fact a comics fan too.

Read: The Waste Lands–“Key and Rose,” parts 1-16

I realize it’s a mug’s game to criticize a depiction of time-travel paradoxes by saying “hey, that’s not how that would work!”, but, well, hey, that’s not how that would work!

Roland’s bifurcating memories make sense. He was doing his quest thing and came across Jake, who’d been killed in our world and then brought over into Roland’s world. Various things that Roland and Jake did together, including Roland allowing Jake to fall into that pit in the mountains and die, enabled Roland to catch the man in black. This in turn enabled Roland to enter our world. While he was there he prevented Jake from being killed.

Boom! Paradox. The only way Roland even got to the point where he could prevent Jake from being killed is for Jake to have been killed. He’s running around as an impossible man, continuing a timeline that he himself has just prevented from starting. As the storyteller you’ve got a couple of options at this point: You can have Roland’s entire post-meeting-Jake timeline fade or blink from existence and start over at the point of origin, thereby retconning all that stuff, OR you can say “Okay, the post-meeting-Jake timeline still exists for Roland, so that he COULD stop Jake from being killed, but now that’s ruptured his brain and he’s got two sets of memories.” That’s what King did.

BUT, then there’s Jake’s situation. In the original timeline, he got killed in our world and brought over to Roland’s world. He and Roland had some adventures, and then Roland let him die. Because of all that, Roland had the chance to enter our world, and why he was there he stopped Jake from being killed. So Jake continues living in our world.

Where’s the paradox there? In the original timeline, he died and got brought over to Roland-land, and in the new one he didn’t because Roland hijacked the body of the guy who pushed him. It’s the equivalent of Roland going back in time to tell HIMSELF not to do something. THAT Roland wouldn’t have two sets of memories; neither should this Jake. It would be one thing if the Jake that had gone into Roland-world was still around–HE’D have the two sets of memories. But this one never went there, never did any of that stuff. Why does HE have bifurcated memories?

And this is without any of the business about our-world-Jake “remembering” the circumstances of his own death even before they WOULD have happened in the original timeline. That’s not a time-travel issue, that’s a magic issue, pertaining (I guess) to King’s collective-destiny concept ka-tet. Now that I think of it, that shows up in a lot of his books, that feeling that you’re with the people you’re supposed to be with and doing the things you’re supposed to be doing–it certainly happened with the kids in It and with Nick & Tom and Stu & Glen in The Stand. So in all likelihood that’s the explanation for the time-travel wonkiness too: Jake “remembers” what happened to him even though he never was never advanced far enough along this timeline to really-remember it at all because it was his ka and the continuing of his life along a never-got-killed, never-went-into-another-world timeline wasn’t. But if you’re used to thinking about these things along the lines of how they worked in Terminator or Back to the Future or whatever, man, does it knock you out of the action.

This week’s Horror Roundtable presents Halloween tips from its esteemed panel. Mine might put you in mind of a certain Smiths album title.

Read: The Waste Lands–the rest of “Bear and Bone”

Looks like King finally figured out what his series was about, as this section of Book Three concludes with a wholly unabashed infodump about the decaying nature of space-time in Roland’s world. Not to put too fine a point on it, but just like telling us Roland’s going crazy in the introduction and then having Roland himself spell out “I’m going crazy” rather than showing us, this is some weak storytelling. I guess it’s supposed to have a “Council of Elrond” feel, but instead it feels like what it probably was–King suddenly realizing why Roland needed to get to the Dark Tower after years of writing about the journey. Here we see the big problem with the “make it up as you go along” school of epic fantasy writing.

I did like the robots, though, and the abandoned machinery. It kind of reminded me of how creepy the air raid siren was in the old Rod Taylor The Time Machine–a machine that has outlived its purpose (and its makers) by so long that it loses, for lack of a better word, context can be very disconcerting, sad, frightening. Even this section, though, seemed overwritten, intent on telegraphing just how disconcerted and saddened and frightened the characters were rather than allowing these emotions to unfold before us.

I saw this on a movie marquee as I was driving today and nearly crashed the car. Sea Monsters 3-D? What the hell is THAT?”

Apparently, it’s this.

Holy crap.

I know that, as Matt Zoller Seitz says in his review, 50% of the movie probably is kind of boring, stagey examinations of paleontology a la the IMAX movie at the Museum of Natural History, but if the other 50% is GIANT PREHISTORIC SEA CREATURES IN 3-D?

Holy crap.

Read: The Waste Lands, “Bear and Bone” parts 1-21

Well, the show goes on, at least for now.

I find that I really don’t give a shit about Eddie and Susannah at all, which is probably a pretty big problem given that they show no signs of going away. Indeed, one of the future installments of the series is called Song of Susannah, so unless that’s intended in the same way that, like, “American Pie” is the Song of the Big Bopper, she at least is sticking around and staying in the foreground. They’re just so much less interesting than Roland, so of a piece with every other screwed-up just-folks King everyman and everywoman. Give me the granite-faced cowboy-cum-knight-errant over a pair of Mary Sues for King’s attitudes toward substance abuse, sibling rivalry, racial relations and mental illness anyday.

I don’t know, maybe that’s unfair. Maybe I just fell in love with an idea of what this series was going to be–no-frills post-apocalyptic dark fantasy starring Clint Eastwood, Stephen King’s answer to The Road Warrior–and am bummed that I can’t write Books Two-onward as an armchair author. But I feel pretty secure in saying that the material with Eddie and Odetta/Detta/Susannah, and the material involving Roland set in our world, is less successful even on its own terms than the original all-Roland all-Mid-World* material was on its terms.

But I’ll tell you one thing: Of all the possible plot twists I expected, a giant 70-foot cyborg bear built along with eleven other giant animal cyborgs to protect an interdimensional portal by some futuristic-by-today’s-standards military-tech company that in fact predates the current action by some two millennia was not one of them! I sort of wish this discovery hadn’t been spoiled by an illustration that showed up before the revelation did in the text itself, but oh well. This is the kind of batshit crazy stuff the previous volume could have stood to have a lot more of. A 2,000-year-old half-animal, half-machine bear the size of King Kong! That’s GREAT.

The other thing that got me pretty excited is what I believe to be the first sign that these books tie into King works other than the ones involving Flagg: the Turtle, one of the Twelve Guardians who, like the giant bear, protect the dimensional portals. Roland says he’s a really important guardian and (quoting a bit of doggerel) that “he holds us all within his mind.” That sure as shooting sounds like the Turtle from It, the giant extra-dimensional being that supposedly vomited up the universe and served as the benevolent opposition to It Itself.

It was at this point that I realized I’m not reading these books like regular books, where I derive enjoyment primarily from the plot and the prose and the characters. I’m reading them like a game or a puzzle, impatiently plowing through accounts of how Eddie was better at basketball than his brother and anxiously awaiting the parts where another pair of pieces come together or another major clue is revealed. I’m reading them so that I can read Wikipedia entries on King characters like Flagg without worrying about having something that happens to them in a whole ‘nother book spoiled.

* PS: A whole lot of basic information about these books, like the name of the world Roland inhabits, show up in the Arguments or Afterwords or jacket copy before they show up in the text itself. Besides the name “Mid-World,” I’m pretty sure I learned about the nature of Roland’s quest (something’s broken with reality and he wants to go to the Dark Tower to try and fix it), his last name (Deschain), and the fact that he’s going insane from these extra-diegetic sources rather than the story itself.

The reason I got so upset when I found out there’s a revised version of The Gunslinger isn’t some sort of principled opposition to authors or filmmakers or whoever altering their work after the fact. For every Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars Episode IV there’s a French interlude in Apocalypse Now Redux or a Bilbo stealing the Ring rather than winning it in The Hobbit. From what I can gather–via an email from Tom the Dog and this post by Bruce Baugh, the near-simultaneous reading of which is what alerted me to the existence of the revised Gunslinger–this happens to fall a bit closer to the former category than the latter, at least in my view, because it involves going back and planting clues that weren’t there after the resolution to the mystery had been thought up and judged insufficiently supported by what had already been written. It’s tough to think of that as anything but cheating, but hey, I’m willing to extend the benefit of the doubt until I read it.

What really ticked me off is simply that this is a time-consuming project as it is, involving some fairly intense concentrated reading of a long series of long books I find I’m not super-enjoying, without having to go back and re-read an entire book. Which is clearly (clearly to me at least) what I’d have to do to glean everything that King intended to be gleaned.

Feh.

Can someone at least tell me WHEN he made these revisions? Like after which book in the series did he go back and revise the first one? I’m assuming he did this between books Four and Five, because the unrevised Gunslinger that I read bears the same trade dress as my copy of Book Four, Wizard and Glass. But I’m not gonna assume anymore. Point being that maybe after I read the last book written prior to the revisions, then I’ll stop and read the revised version of The Gunslinger before reading the remaining books. This would probably mean that I have my reading schedule set through December, which is frustrating, which is why I’m not 100% sure I’ll do it at all, but we’ll see.

I wish the comments worked just as much as you do, but alas, so please hit the email link in the left-hand sidebar and clue me in. Do try to avoid spoilers, please.

Argh.

There’s a REVISED version of The Gunslinger?????

This pretty much makes me want to stop reading these books.

While the “infected with rage” angle is fresh, the plot of 28 Days Later essentially apes (or is it pays homage to?) the story arc of Romero’s Dead trilogy (Night, Dawn, and Day) in 100 minutes.

—Stacie Ponder

Read: The Drawing of the Three–“The Pusher”; “Final Shuffle”

Now that I’ve finished it I can safely say that I liked The Drawing of the Three less than The Gunslinger, maybe a lot less depending on how I feel at the moment you ask me. It’s not that it’s a bad book, although the flaws stand out clearer here than in most of the King I’ve read, the main one being the ostentatious overwriting of the main action sequences. During Eddie and the gunslinger’s confrontation with Balazar and his underlings, and during the gunslinger/Jack Mort’s rampage through the gun shop and the drug store, practically every sentence uttered and every movement made is surrounded by three or four paragraphs detailing what the gunslinger’s thinking, what his our-world counterpart is thinking, what each of their antagonists are thinking, and on and on and on. I’ve seen King employ this technique of superdecompressing an action sequence before during the shootout with the “zookeepers” in The Stand–and to much greater effect, since its use was basically limited to that one sequence, where it was meant to convey how a lifetime of terror and violence was packed into a minute-long confrontation. Here it’s the default mode, and it eats up page after page for no reason.

But the main reason I prefer The Gunslinger is that The Gunslinger is just different. Different setting, different style, different tone, different structure than most any King novel I’d read, and this is all to its benefit. With The Drawing of the Three you can do an apples to apples comparison with pretty much any King book. It doesn’t feel special, which is how an epic fantasy life’s-work type thing should feel.

But I don’t want to be churlish. I liked the “lobstrosities,” the monotony of the characters’ journey on the beach, and (in this most recent section) the fun of watching the gunslinger use the body of the serial killer he finds himself inhabiting as the equivalent of a kamikaze airplane. Of course the guy deserved it, but seeing the glee with which Roland inflicts pain upon this body he’s hijacked brings back the grim gunslinger of the first book, the one who’d let a kid die rather than risk his quest. This goes double with the two cops he dupes and then assaults–as we learn, his actions that day all but ruin their lives and careers, not to mention necessitate major surgery on at least one, and their only crime was being kind of lame. After all those tender times with Eddie and Odetta, it’s nice to see the gunslinger being scary again.

And oh yeah–Flagg shows up in this section! Well, kind of. He’s mentioned, in passing, as someone (or something–Roland’s onto him) the gunslinger encountered once long ago, a powerful magician who turned someone into a dog and was being chased by two guys named Dennis and Thomas. These of course are the characters from The Eyes of the Dragon who vowed to chase Flagg, the villain of that book, through whatever other dimensions he traversed until they caught him and put a stop to his evil. What really surprised me about this passage is how minor it made Flagg seem–it’s a throwaway mention of the character, who apparently kind of briefly brushed up against Roland during a confusing time in the gunslinger’s life, and who most importantly has nothing to do with Marten or Walter or any of the other big bads in Roland’s quest. Consider me flummoxed.

PS: This book offered a curious amount of interior monologue for ancillary characters: Jane the flight attendant, that mafia goon who worships Balazar, Odetta’s limo driver, the cops, Katz the pharmacist, etc. At any moment you’d think that one of them is about to become an important character in the book, but you’d be wrong.

PPS: Here’s a custom-made Roland action figure by Joe Acevedo. (Hat tip: Justin Aclin.) He looks a lot younger than I see him, insofar as he doesn’t look exactly like Clint Eastwood, but hey.

Entertainment Weekly presents a history lesson on the dispute between New Line and Peter Jackson that’s keeping The Hobbit from being made–and, to put it in the terms important to the studio, preventing another couple billion dollars from being grossed. The piece largely confirms the impression that while Jackson (and the other LOTR talent who’ve taken issue with New Line’s accounting practices) are justified in their demands, the studio seems to have gone nuclear in response more out of pique than out of any kind of legal precedent. It goes on to report that a thaw is at hand and a deal may soon follow for Jackson to at least produce the Hobbit movie(s), if not direct them (something his current slate of projects may prevent), but without any specific sources or evidence cited to support this, who knows. (Via AICN.)

Over at Comic Book Resources I have a lengthy interview with Eric Reynolds, co-editor of Fantagraphics’ engrossing quarterly anthology series Mome. Check it out!

Remember when Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture at the Oscars? That was pretty fucking crazy, wasn’t it?

I bring this up because, inspired by the completion of Ken Burns’ The War, I just watched the Omaha Beach sequence of Saving Private Ryan and marveled once again at how frightening it is.

What other movies have intensely scary openings? The two that jump to mind are the Dawn of the Dead remake and 28 Weeks Later, but obviously there are others that I’m missing.

Read: The Drawing of the Three–“Shuffle”; “The Lady of the Shadows”; “Re-Shuffle”

At this point what strikes me the most about Book Two in this series is how different it is and how different it feels from Book One. The Gunslinger was really no-frills, a collection of very austere short stories lashed together between two covers. Even if King’s comparative inexperience as a writer led him to the occasional, perhaps unintentional storytelling complexity–like the extended flashback within an extend flashback in the opening chapter–the book was a journey every bit as straightforward and austere as the gunslinger’s.

In The Drawing of the Three, however, you’ve got this comparatively elaborate structure involving a prologue, a section introducing a new main character, a sort of intermezzo section paced to mimic fading in and out of consciousness, a nother section introducing another new main character, another intermezzo, and so on. Meanwhile you’re dipped back into King’s reference-heavy idiom-heavy modern-day mode of storytelling after spending all of Book One in tersely worded depictions of a barren fantasy world. What’s more, the gunslinger is now sharing top billing with (so far) two characters who almost never shut up, and whose psychological conditions make them prone to sounding antsy at best and psychotic at worst. It’s all but cacophonous compared to the first installment.

But I’m impressed by the way the characters’ long, tedious journey up the unchanging beach maintained the feeling of austerity that I found so appealing in Book One. It really just goes on and on and on. Even the presence of the lobstrosities becomes more of a chore than a thrill due to the constancy of the threat they present, and their monotonous querulous yammering. Ditto Detta Walker, the nymphomaniacal kleptomanaiacl sociopathic stereotype split personality of Odetta Holmes, the rich, beautiful and intelligent civil rights activist whose “drawing” is the main event of this book’s second major section. King makes her taunting, shrieking banter with Roland and Eddie menacing to them through its annoyingness as much as through the knowledge that she’ll make good on her threats if she gets the chance.

As for Odetta/Detta herself, I’m a little bit unwilling to let myself invest in her as a character, because I was so thrown by King’s hamfisted mafia characters that I’ve now got my convinced he’s just as bad at capturing any other subculture. At least with Detta he’s given himself the out that this alternate personality (and by the way, schizophrenia isn’t the right word for this condition at all, though I dunno, I guess that’s what they called it back then or else Ian Hunter wouldn’t have named his solo album You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic) is deliberately a racist, misogynist cliché.

As a side note, I have a very clear picture of each of these characters in my head. Roland is Clint Eastwood, Eddie is the Larry Underwood from the TV version of The Stand, and Detta and Odetta are, interestingly enough to me, two different contestants from this season of America’s Next Top Model, the latest episode of which I watched just prior to reading this section. (FYI: Detta, Odetta.) I have no idea what that means.

PS: I forgot to say this yesterday, but if Roland is so amazed at the abundance of things like paper and sugar in our world, shouldn’t he be even more amazed at the presence of so many guns in the hands of so many losers? Isn’t that kind of the whole core of his upbringing?

PPS: It might be fun if Book Three is as structurally different from Book Two as Book Two is from Book One, and so on throughout the series. Like, maybe one of them is an epic poem in free verse, and one of them is a Finnegan’s Wake stream of consciousness.

According to Bloody Disgusting, the directing team of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury are in negotiations to helm the Hellraiser remake. BD regards this as good news based on the duo’s film À L’Intérieur, which was recently acquired by the Weinstein Co. (Sorry, Jason.) We shall see.

Read: The Drawing of the Three–“Prologue: The Sailor”; “The Prisoner”

I don’t know if it’s just the slightly more conventional typeface used in my copy of this book or what, but even before we jump into modern-day America with the gunslinger, this book feels a lot more like a traditional Stephen King story. Maybe it’s those creepy “lobstrosities” (neologisms FTW!) that crawl out of the water and chop off Roland’s fingers and toes–not only do they feel like angry refugees from “The Mist,” but their simple presence as a swarm of megafauna in a world that I’d assumed was pretty much depleted of such things by this point changes the abandoned feel of the gunslinger’s environment instantly. They also dramatically raise the stakes right off the bat, irrevocably injuring the main character in a way that fundamentally alters his ability to live up to his own title–it’s a lot tougher to sling guns with two fingers missing from your right hand–and leaving him at death’s door.

Speaking of doors, the door concept, the portal by which Roland can enter our world through the eyes of junkie and amateur drug-smuggler Eddie Dean, is certainly a striking image, especially when you learn it’s always visible to the travelers if they turn their heads back. And Roland’s culture shock is a lot of fun, as is the basic idea that he can hijack this poor junkie dude, as is the smuggler’s-blues/never-trust-a-junkie interior monlogue King gives Eddie.

But I can’t for the life of me figure out why the door is there, or more specifically what Roland did to earn his discovery of it. Was it sacrificing Jake and catching the man in black? Who, by the way, he didn’t even really defeat–the guy just kind of gave up and ended up dying of old age in the real world while taking Roland on a guided tour of the universe in his mind or the astral plane or whatever? Having the door just magically appear feels like a cheat.

Meanwhile, Roland’s initially entertaining foray into Eddie’s world culminates in extravantly overwritten, not-at-all-believable confrontations with an airplane flight crew and a bizarrely multiethnic mafia family, the latter of which is gilded with an ersatz Godfather philosopher-king don and his central-casting goons who’re all about as realistic as comparable characters from your basic grim’n’gritty hackwork Batman comic. Surely there have been other times where King has dropped the ball this completely in his depiction of an American subculture, but I can’t think of one nearly as glaring. It undermines the already shaky realism of the climactic shoot-out and the emotional weight of Eddie’s final decision to join Roland on the other side of the door. Let’s see if the drawing of character #2 ends on a higher note.

PS: Looks like Bruce Baugh will be blogging a (re-)read-through of The Dark Tower too–including related novels from throughout King’s body of work. Compare and contrast!

PPS: Did I ever mention that Roland doesn’t still have a hawk?

SciFi Wire brings more news of the ever-shittier-sounding The Dark Is Rising film adaptation, aka The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising: For some reason it’s now simply called The Seeker. You can check out director David L. Cunningham’s explanations for some of the major changes made to the book for the movie, if you’re into that sort of thing. Believe it or not this movie comes out this Friday; I love the books so much that I’ll probably see it, even though I really oughta know better.

Read: The Gunslinger

This was the first prose book I read in one sitting in a long, long time. Not even because I was so thoroughly engrossed or anything like that–just because from the moment I saw how quickly I was progressing through my slim trade paperback edition of the book, I considered it a fun and surmountable challenge to myself to get all the way through in one night.

I’d wondered how King would adapt to a story set in a fantasy world (perhaps a distantly post-apocalyptic one, from what I can gather) where he couldn’t indulge in his usual pop-culture references and American idioms. Turns out he manages pretty well, substituting all that for a very bleak, almost fatalistic tone reminiscent of some of his nastier short stories. (About the only rock and roll reference in the whole magilla is the notion that in this strange culture, the song “Hey Jude” has become a folk anthem of sorts, the kind of nod to the might of the Beatles that you don’t see this disciple of Eddie Cochran make very often.)

It wasn’t until the very, very end of the book, after a couple hundred pages of picturing the mysterious man in black as Randy Flagg in a monk’s outfit, that it became apparent that this guy wasn’t Flagg after all. Given the book’s convoluted publication history–its first chapter was written some 12 years before the novel’s initial publication and was printed in a genre fiction magazine as a stand-alone short story, as were all the subsequent chapters–I guess Flagg didn’t even exist when the man in black was first conceived of by King.

Even more strikingly, the same can be said of the majority of the book’s alluded-to backstory, since King admits in his afterword that he’s really making it up as he goes along and will fill in the gaps–what kind of revolution befell the gunslinger’s home, how his various friends and enemies died, what he’s done on his not-coincidentally 12-year quest to catch the man in black–when he gets to ’em. He also expresses confidence that this information is there, somewhere inside his brain. I don’t really doubt that, but for someone weaned on Tolkien, a guy who but for a desire to give vent to an elaborately detailed backstory wouldn’t have told the main story at all, it comes as a bit of a shock.

As for the story itself, it’s the kind of high concept that non-Big Two, non-arthouse comics publishers live and die for: “Conan starring Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name.” That’s pretty brilliant, and as is the case with The Stand, strong casting (done in this case by me and not by TV producers) carries the book through its weaker spots. Although now that I think about it there’s no glaring missteps to speak of, just that bone-dry tone that can get tedious at times but for the presence of Dirty Harry in fantasy drag.

The set pieces are a mixed bag. On the high end is the gunslinger’s massacre of every single resident of the town of Tull, led by a fundamentalist zealot preacher of the BBW variety; the gunslinger’s discovery of Jake, a little boy from New York killed by the man in black and dragged into the gunslinger’s world to be sacrificed by the gunslinger in his pursuit of the MIB and thus to haunt his conscience; and the long journey by handcart through the mountains, reminiscent of both the Mines of Moria and the Lincoln Tunnel sequence in The Stand. Weaker are the horny female oracle, the fairly nondescript Slow Mutants, and the man in black’s startling revelation of the nature of their world, which presents straight-faced an idea best reserved for zonked-out collegiate bullshitting and Onion articles.

I think the best thing about the book is the overall sense of decrepitude and futility, like we’re in a world that’s just about at the end of its timeline and is poised to go out with a whimper. The desert, the willow forest, the mountains, the caves, the ocean–they all seem kind of hopeless, like the desert planet in King’s short story “Beachworld” now that I think about it. I hope the future volumes stick with this smart use of environment as secondary antagonist, nothingplaces where the man in black and his superiors thrive.