Ordered these at Bullmoose.
As usual, one was the slowpoke holding up the works.
Still two days faster than the last batch of Lovecraft rebuttal-quels.
The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
The Testaments (2019)
"Handmaid's" is one of those ones you know you ought to read, but you keep kicking the can down the road, and kicking it, and kicking it.
Billdude mentioned it has the same anti-Reagan inspiration as "Lilith's Brood" and they came out in the same general time period, and I had all this X-mas card cash burning a hole in my pocket, so I'm like "fuck it, now's the time! Let's do it!".
Then, I discovered looking up "Handmaid's", that part two actually came out just seven years ago! So! Yoink!
Garth Marenghi's Terrortome (2022)
Garth Marenghi's Incarcerat (2023)
I stumbled into the existence of these doing my research dive for the show.
They're written by the actor who played Garth in character as Garth.
Then he does the audiobook in character, and he's also doing a book tour in character.
There's a part three (This Bursted Earth), but it just came out late last year, and the physical copy is only available in the UK.
For now. I'll get it when the paperback drops here.
The over-arching plot of the trilogy seems like a mashup of "Lathe Of Heaven" and "Word Processor of the Gods".
I've got the Stephen Kings ahead of me as my tribute read to my mother, but that kinda sets a sad pall over it, and makes it a stubborn bottleneck, so I needed a happy antidote to break me free. These are totally it! Just knowing these are on the shelf cheers me up no end.
Now I've got the fortitude to get through everything.
Watership Down (1972)
Watership Down (Movie) (1978)
The book version was the slowpoke this time.
I gave up, and bodily dragged my ass to just go get the other five, cuz I wanted them so badly.
But! In a rare case of good luck, it was there!
Boom!
I saw the movie as a kid, and it scarred me.
Then, geez, like, ten years ago now, Hyla did a huge write-up of both the movie and book on his blog....that you can't see anymore. 🙄
Basic cable recently played the movie at 3 AM, and I stayed the fuck up 'til 5 to take it all in.
I loved it! It's "Lord Of The Rings" with bunnies.
With all the hard PG-13 that entails!! It's not a baby's movie!
I dunno what was wrong with past-me. I friggin' watched "Conan The Barbarian" and "Beastmaster" with no problem back then.
I guess seeing bunnies get hurt poked a sensitive spot.
I grew up with outdoor cats all my life, and they had bloody gory barbarian quest adventures.
Christ, a couple of my cats could have been the villains in "Watership". 😆
Anyway!! Got both versions!
The book is a fucking tome!
I yanked out and threw away MWMBNBM, and now "Watership" takes its spot. 😏😎
So!! That's all those!!!
Stay tuned for the reviews!!
2 comments:
Some of "The Handmaid's Tale" was a response to the rise of various religious fundamentalists in the power-hungry 1980s and it's also been said some of it was a response to environmental disasters like Three Mile Island and Bhopal (you know Bhopal, right? Someone argued that it's the biggest event since 1960 that kids never learn about anymore). I think THT more or less deserves its reputation as a classic; be advised that the opening passages are the best, when it's being established what happened. (It also deserves credit for not making its villain a cartoon character.)
I haven't seen or read any Richard Adams stuff but what I have watched is parts of "The Plague Dogs," which was made into an animated movie in 1982 and is said to be the bleakest kids' animated movie ever, depending on who you ask. Here's a glowing review from a guy who loved it:
http://www.moriareviews.com/fantasy/plague-dogs-1982.htm
It's based on a book as well.
Speaking of Margaret Atwood, I jumped ahead and read Ursula K. Le Guin's final novel "Lavinia," a retelling of the second half of the Aeneid (the story of Aeneas escaping the burning of Troy to head for Rome and start a new people, the Latins--it's where the story of the Trojan horse actually comes from, and it's by Vergil, not Homer) but from the point of view of Lavinia, the princess Aeneas marries, who has no lines in the original poem. It reads stylistically far closer to Margaret Atwood than Le Guin's science fiction classics and indeed while looking into reviews and such for "Lavinia" I found out that Margaret Atwood wrote "The Penelopiad" three friggin' years earlier, which is The Odyssey told from the point of view of Odysseus' wife Penelope. (Of course, the whole "rewrite the story from the POV of the lesser known female character" conceit is pretty old, going back through "The Mists Of Avalon" which you've probably heard of and I think started "Wide Sargasso Sea" in 1966.) It was a decent book though.
Oh noes, Erich von Daniken died!! You should do a retrospective making fun of him like the Warrens
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