Literature of Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy- Jay Burns

This week I read the classic fantasy book that is The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. When I was a kid I watched the Lord of the Rings movies many times but could never seem to make it through them without falling asleep, but I found that while reading The Hobbit, I couldn't put it down. The story feels the same but also completely different from the Lord of the Rings movies, whether it be the set up or the fact that it was coming from different mediums and while reading I could be more imaginative. I could argue that it wasn't the change of mediums because I had also tried to read the Lord of the Rings books when I was a kid and couldn't get a couple chapters in. It's obvious with any of these stories kinds of stories, especially young adult novels, that the heroes journey practically screams in your face. It feels like J.R.R. Tolkien saw what the heroes journey and literally built his story around that idea, like he took as a rule that he had to follow to the tee. In the h...

For this week I read Redlands by Jordie Bellaire and Vanesa Del Ray. I first want to address that it was really refreshing to have a witch story not take place in Salem because it feels like every single witch story takes place there. It was really cool to see how the change of location in what we usually think of as "American Witches" and how that impacted how they act and use their magic. These comics scream woman empowerment, literally having it start with them taking over a town run by men. However, I'm not 100% sure if its portrayed as a good thing because they constantly are killing innocent people ion the town for their witchcraft, which is counterproductive to what I think the authors want to portray which is positive women empowerment. The women use their power in the towns government, being leaders of the police dept. and detectives so they can lie about things happening in the town. It is good to show women in such a place of power but its not portrayed in a go...

Borne by Jeff Vandermeer is definitely a weird book. The concepts presented in the book are so out there I had never heard of such a story before. But that doesn't mean it was bad, in fact I'm really happy the "New Weird" is becoming a new genre. Stories have been becoming stale and seems like you're reading the same story over and over just in different skin, but with New Weird it's just so different and fresh. It's also so weird that we end up stop questioning the world we are reading about and we can explore aspects of humanity that we wouldn't be able explore in other kinds of stories. I also watched Cabin in the Woods and its such a good twist on horror movies. It calls out tropes in horror movies and also gives almost an explanation as to why the people in other horror movies act the way they do. I'm really happy to see that stories are moving to be more original, even if they seem very weird at first, it's refreshing to see original sto...

For this weeks reading I decided to read a manga I had been meaning to read for a long time now. I read Uzumaki by Junji Ito. Junji Ito is seen by a lot of people as the master of master horror. His ability to give the reader the feeling of absolute confusion and never giving any of his secrets away, leaving the reader just as lost as the characters makes his stories fascinating and horrifying. He also writes about concepts never shown anywhere else in the world. For example, Uzumaki is all about spirals and how a town descends into madness from the supernatural fascination that come with them. I find it amazing that he can take something so mundane and everyday into something of nightmares. I think thats something that really special about j-horror is the lack of tropes/trying to find the story into a specific kind of horror. With western horror, theres just slashers, witches, zombies, demons, ect. But with j-horror, they look past just simple monsters and dive deep into what really m...