books, Reviews

(book) Graham Masterton – ‘The Pariah’

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This webzine is full of Graham Masterton book reviews. The reason is that I love this horror author so much and I read really a lot of his novels, almost everything he wrote. Well, the time has come for ‘The Pariah’ to be read and grace the pages of this webzine. John Trenton lives in Granitehead, a little New England place near famous Salem, where all those witch trials took place and people were executed. John lost his wife Jane and unborn son in a tragic accident short while ago. But, Jane is not lost and somehow connects with John and talks to him through her scary apparitions. John has an antique store and buys a painting of long lost ship called ‘David Dark’ which apparently sunk in the waters near Granitehead. John realizes that he is not the only one who sees dead relatives in Granitehead and grisly deaths start to happen to those who see the dead. John realizes with help of local historians that there is something in the sunken ship which causes dead to rise and must try to stop it.

I can safely say that this one is one of Masterton’s best works I have read yet and I have read many believe me. This is constant chilling atmosphere, grey New England is a perfect place for horror to happen and finale is just epic and fighting the demon is something best I have read ever. John and other characters are fluidly written, there is no filler pages or boring parts that you read in order to get to the interesting ones again. No, this one is tour de force in horror novel. There are some really gory parts and there are some explicit sexual parts like we are used to with Masterton works. This is a mixture of gothic ghost story, demons, gore and walking dead. Just perfect!

Reviews

(review) Remark – ‘The Process Of Learning’

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Remark are hailing from Quebec, Canada and this is their debut full length album. This band started as an online project of two friends, namely Marco Gurtner – guitar and vocals plus Richard Cloutier – bass and drums. There are 15 songs in all on this one, I must say that I am pleased with how this album turned out. This is fast melodic, anthemic hardcore punk with great harmonies, vocal lines and good songwriting throughout the album, there are no fillers on this one. There are couple of really great melancholic melodies that reminded me of band from Serbia called Six Pack, like awesome song ‘The Process Of Learning’, the title song of the album. In other songs, music of Remark reminds me a bit of Bad Religion in their best era, nineties style Bad Religion, also Swedish No Fun At All and Ten Foot Pole. Lyrics are in three languages, English, French and German, so this is really great international little of a melodic punk jewel of a record. My other personal favorites are ‘Compass’, ‘Unser Land’ and ‘New Horizons’. This is one of the better albums I have listened to in last couple of weeks.

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movie

(movie) The Red Book Ritual (2022) – not really successful anthology horror!

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The Red Book Ritual evolves around three young people. One night in a house supposedly belonging to the missing witch, they play a game asking questions to the ancient book with red covers which has been in the house since forever. They open the book and read sentences from it like answers to their questions. They get scared and ask the book how do they get out of the game. The book’s answer is read me! So, they start to read the stories from the book as segments of this anthology horror movie. For starters, I must say that even main storyline in this anthology, or the binding story premise is stupid and three main characters are so lame and thrashy that you can’t really build your sympathy for neither of them. The four-five segments or stories in this anthology are done poorly and although they build up in me some interest and some scary moments these are so few and far between. I must say that the Asian horror segment is most interesting to me, I wondered all the time whether it is so poorly synchronized with characters’ voices purposefully or is it just thrash like other things in this movie. This one doesn’t last long, hour and twenty minutes but sometimes feels like a drag and some of the segments are just not ended or looks like they have not been written until the end. The ending is like the movie as a whole, confusing, done in a hurry, for what is worse made in a thought that it is cool and it is super, but this one is under the radar for us horror fans. One of the not so good that came out in recent times.

Gore effects: 3/10 axes – there are couple of full frontal nudity scenes and couple of bloody and carnage scenes, but in all very poor.

Acting: 2/10 axes – all of the actors are unknown and no one stands out from thrashy over acting or under acting. Just plain bad.

Conclusion: 3/10 axes – I will give this one three out of ten, simply because I love horror and I love horror anthology subgenre, but this is one of the lousy ones. Rather spend hour and twenty watching or doing something else. Go get better movie or a great horror book.

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