Hellboy, Heart-Shaped Box, and the Historian
July 5th, 2008Used to be, when Husband was out all night working that DJ voodoo of his, I’d inevitably manage to scare the bejeezus out of myself with a horror movie. Not intentionally. I’d pick the dumbest looking, most innocuous movies I could find, but damn if they wouldn’t turn out to be unexpected little genre gems. By the by, I’m still swearing vengeance on whoever told me Skeleton Key was a romantic comedy. (It’s most assuredly not).
OK, yeah, I knew House by the Cemetery was a horror movie. I just didn’t know it would be scary. The cover art looked downright silly and it didn’t say it was a Lucio Fulci movie anywhere on the box. But I digress…
Tonight I decided to spare myself the jitters and leave the TV off. I thought I’d make some progress on the pile of books on the side table. After a few chapters, it occurred to me that Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box, a nice little ghost story, was probably not the best choice. I’m still not sure how I feel about the book. I’m 3/4 of the way through and it’s interesting how engrossing the book is despite the fact that the main characters aren’t very likeable. But at the same time, they aren’t completely unlikeable. Perhaps that’s the answer - they’re really rather human, which makes them interesting and a bit unpredictable. Nevertheless, I suspected by the end I’d be jumping at my own reflection in the mirrors so it had better go back on the pile for the night. Every once in a while I still display a rare bit of common sense.
I moved on to a reread of some Hellboy (Seed of Destruction and Wake the Devil
) since Hellboy 2 hits theaters soon. (Plus, it always makes me laugh the way Mrs. Cavendish calls Hell boy “Mr. Boy.”)
I’ve picked up Elizabeth Kostova’s 800 page behemoth, The Historian and am about to drag it up to bed. I suspect it’s going to put me to sleep in fairly short order. Not because of the prose or storytelling, which seem quite competent, but because the book weighs a ton and it’s probably going to be too much work to keep both it and myself propped up in the bed. Maybe it would be safer to swim back in to that backlog of New Yorker’s. They don’t leave bruises if you drift off to sleep and they fall out of your hands and onto your chest. Safety first and all that.