The Mission of This Blog

 This blog is dedicated to exploring and reviewing genre literature and film, with a particular emphasis on science fiction and horror. I believe that genre works are just as worthy of legitimate critical consideration as more "serious" literature and film. As this blog develops, I will set a schedule of various themed days, with considerations of both old and new works.


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Matango

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  Matango, also known by its English translation titles Attack of the Mushroom People  and Fungus of Terror , is a decidedly interesting horror film from Ishiro Honda , the director who gave the world Godzilla. As with his better known work, Honda fits serious themes into a horror / sci-fi premise, using this story of a group of people stranded on an island with a serious fungal issue into a metaphor for various societal ills, including the class divide and drug abuse. Matango  is based on the William Hope Hodgson short story " The Voice in the Night ," in which the narrator encounters a shipwrecked man who has fallen victim to fungi on a deserted island. Honda remains faithful to the basic concept of the story, adapting it to film by removing the narrator and concentrating on the people stranded on the island rather than the lone survivor. The film follows the survivors of a ship that was damaged during a storm and runs aground on a desert island. The castaways include the
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Eden by Tim Lebbon

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  Tim Lebbon is one of the best horror writers who remains unknown to the general public. His best novel, The Silence , is a true classic of apocalyptic fiction, tracing the collapse of civilization in Great Britain after a species of small but voracious bat-like predators is released from a cave. The novel evoked how quickly society can collapse in the face of a new threat while also giving a realistic look at how people react to calamities. (Reading the early sections of the novel reminds one of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, with people brushing the disaster off because it's taking place far away.) Lebbon's most recent novel, Eden , has a somewhat similar setting, a society on the verge of collapse due to climate change and environmental degradation. However, rather than focus on this slow-motion apocalypse, he focuses on a place that is comparatively sheltered from it - a "Virgin Zone" or environmental sanctuary called Eden that humans are forbidden fr
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