Movie Reviews: Atomic Blonde, Deflated Luftballon

I wasn’t sure how to start this review. So I’m just going to say, I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed.

I genuinely like Charlize Theron. I’m not a superfan to the point that I watch everything she comes out with, or treat her as my “exception” the way my straight friends do. But she is a bonus for any movie. Unfortunately, like another highly anticipated action movie that Charlize stars in, Aeon Flux, this film both falls short and doesn’t really do justice to the source material.

Atomic Blonde doesn’t fail because of its titular character, though. Problems like this tend to stem from writing, direction, and editing. Since the movie has been out for some time at the writing of this review, I’m just going to tag SPOILERS here, so I can break down the movie on a macro level.

Vamp Reviews: Fledgling

Pictured: Fledgling by a bottle of Poison Girl, with dark purple flowers.
My love for Octavia Butler is deep and all consuming. I’m closing in on reading her entire oeuvre as soon as I nail down the Patternmaster series. She has stories about gene trading aliens, pregnant men, the destruction of America under a demagogic leader, among other thought experiments. She does with sci fi what should be done with sci fi: Explore social phenomenon and test the boundaries of human social expectations.


Fledgling (2005) is no different in this regard. It isn’t my favorite book of hers by any means (that award goes to Parable of the Talents), but it’s just so darn interesting that I’ve returned to it many times. The story follows a young vampire named Shori, who wakes in agonizing pain, nearly burned to death, and blinded, in a cave. As she heals and makes her way out into the world, she has to solve the murder of her family and try to navigate a society she has no memory of in order to get justice or her people.


Fledgling was supposed to be Butler’s “fun” vampire novel, and t was the book she wrote just before she died. (Too soon!) In spite of that, the novel continues to explore the concept of power in hierarchical societies, as well as biological interdependence through a completely original imagining of how vampires and their humans may interact. While some of this novel’s prose isn’t as polished as Butler’s other novels, the conceptual development is more than worth the read.

Sapphic Game Reviews: Blossoms Bloom Best

Pictured: Three women standing in a huge galley. Erica the Captain, Kotoha the otaku engineer, and Sara the only person reacting to this situation normally.

Title: Blossoms Bloom BrightestPlatform: Steam
Cost: Free!
Medium/Genre: Visual Novel/Sci Fi

Blossoms Bloom Brightest is a visual novel about three sapphics in space. They wake up from stasis, with two of the characters, the perky engineer Kotoha (basically an otaku who reminds me of a high school friend of mine) and the justifiably suspicious Sara (who is much more interesting imo, but comes with some serious baggage), as your potential love interests. You guide the actions of the captain, Erica, who mysteriously won’t tell her tiny crew what their mission is or why they’ve been chosen for it.

This is a cute, entertaining little game that takes about an hour to complete for one storyline. Thus, it’s pretty short, although considering the price, you could do worse. The concept behind the plotline is pretty standard sci fi and worth exploration. What the game lacks mostly is development; of plot, of characters, of romantic relationships, you get what you pay for. However, if you enjoy the game, Reine Works and Dharker Studios will be releasing a rebooted version with new artwork, another love interest, and longer gameplay sometime in Summer 2017 under the title Galaxy Angels.

Vamp Reviews: Blood Trail

Pictured Above: My cat with Blood Trail.

Blood Trail was my least favorite installment of the Vicki Nelson series. I'm not sure if that's because the precepts of the series work less well with this plot or because I have such high expectations for werewolf stories.

Yep! In this book, Vicki and Henry go out to London, Ontario to solve the murder of some werewolves. Henry Fitzroy happens to be a friend of the family!

Vamp Reviews: Dracula

This isn't exactly a review, but I'm tagging it under that anyway for easy finding purposes. Imagine a world in which Bram Stoker had an editor.

I appreciate that novels written for serialization tend to run longer. (Though not all parts were serialized.)  This is the common problem WIP fanficcers face, right? And it’s why a lot off high schools let out pained wails at having to read another Dickens novel. But at the same time, I’ve read Dickens and women’s epistolary fiction, which can be just as obsessed with minutia. 

I don’t quibble with the epistolary/found document form, and I might even argue that some of our common forms make the effort to do something quite like what epistolary does, without much effort of pretense. So many found footage movies, especially in horror. Lots of rotating POVs in novels. Some mad love of the first person in YA dystopia and romance. And of course, I have to give him props for the attempt to make this folklore concept “scientific.” That’s what contributes to a lot of the length. Stoker is consolidating a lot of lore in one place to bring the old horror to the contemporary world. Van Helsing is trying to explain this complicated supernatural phenomenon and convince the characters, and thereby the audience, to buy into what’s happening. It’s drawing a line between his work and the penny dreadfuls. 

This is also why you have an American, a Texan no less, hanging around with his bowie knife. It’s why Mina talks about what the New Woman would think, and speculates that someday, she will be asking the men to marry her. Lucy is delighted by slang. The present day xenophobia is as ubiquitous in the novel as the body horror of an undead monster sucking your bodily fluids.

Regardless, this book experiences some serious middle-of-the-plot sag.  There are moments when his characters literally repeat something they just said. Van Helsing has looong speeches about practically everything. He gives Dr. Seward the randomest speech about “King Laughter,” aka grief makes you react in irrational ways, that is SO LONG. There was no reason for that to be there. Sometimes, some things, you have to summarize. 

I look at literature with a critical modern eye as a writer, but also as someone who has taught literature. I love Austen more than my students can appreciate, but I can also say that sometimes even the canon authors need to kill their damn darlings. And if that means tightening up the middle of Dracula to get back to the action and not lose the tensions rising around Mina’s vulnerability, so be it. 

Any canonized authors, or just wildly popular authors, who you wish you could give writing advice?

Vamp Reviews: Blood Price

These days, you can’t seem to throw a stone without hitting a brooding vampire… or at least a brooding vampire SERIES. Anne Rice, the Sookie Stackhouse novels, Twilight, and the Vampire Diaries… everyone had a deep Teutonic brow and even deeper angst.

But this isn’t the only feature to vampire fiction. Bram Stoker isn’t even the originator of the genre, if we’re being really honest. Now that I’ve been rereading some of my favorite (as well as less than favorite classics) of the vampire genre, I thought perhaps it would do me good to put the word out about the world of vampires outside of your run of the mill brooding beau.

Mostly, I started this because I decided to reread the Vicki Nelson series by Tanya Huff. Huff is an amazing author regardless of the genre, but most of what I associate with her has its place in high fantasy. However, Huff contributed substantially to the urban fantasy build during the 90s, before Sookie and Dresden, before Buffy and Angel. People wanting to look into the urban fantasy genre could do worse than 

The Vicki Nelson series is set, for the most part, in Ontario. Our heroes? The half-blind ex-cop Vicky Nelson, and the bastard (vampire) son of Henry VIII, versus an entitled computer geek and a Demon Lord.

Why not.

Year in Books: March

Behold, I read. Since the beginning of the year, mostly thanks to my freakish friend who reads approximately three books a week, I've been trying to make myself do more reading. FOR FUN.

On the left are the books that I've read so far: Good Omens, Milk and Honey, True Porn Clerk Tales, The Princess Saves Herself in This One, Blockbuster Plots, and Night Sky With Exit Wounds. (Not pictured: 1984, Affinity, and Howl's Moving Castle)

On the Right (under Harley Quinn): Hope in the Dark, Six of Crows, and Bone.

I've been reading a lot of poetry, and it makes me intensely happy. Some Tweet-poetry, some free verse, some experimental. Something about it speaks to the creature inside me, and it makes me want to write more and read more. It's a kind of self-care I've neglected for the past few years because it's always felt as though I needed to be doing something serious or important. And it's caused me to pick my own poems back up for editing, and write at least five new ones.

I really loved Milk and Honey. I just sit and reread. There was no point of flagging which pages I liked the best. I loved The Princess Saves Herself in This One, but I look forward to her next volume because this work feels very raw and fresh, and Lovelace should be quite amazing once she's matured as a poet. Night Sky with Exit Wounds I liked, but I am struggling with some of the poems and will be able to say more after I take the time to reread. 

I have to say, of all the books I've read this year, I was blown away by Howl's Moving Castle. I loved the movie, but the book is so, so much more. It's a fairytale, but not an old one. It's female led, and beautiful and weird, and dark in ways.

Since I'll be going out of town next week (and getting to see my girlfriend <3), I'm hoping to get Six of Crows finished on the plane, or sooner.