roach's reviews
269 reviews

 

(Quote translated from German edition.)

I think this volume was my favorite of the trilogy. Every chapter was a banger with this one, filled with awesome body horror and beautifully creepy imagery. A proper centerpiece for this series. 

I'll be honest, I went in with rather low expectations. The story of Frankenstein has never been one that particularly interested me and I had a feeling this book would probably not carry the same weight today as it did when it was first released. Not because its themes aren't relevant anymore, but because its themes are something that has been explored a ton throughout art by now and isn't as novel anymore. I wasn't sure if this book actually dug deep enough to wow a reader in the 21st century.
I was curious to see if I'd be surprised though and I like the backstory of how Mary Shelley came to create this story after all.

I agree that Frankenstein opens up some great moments about existential themes, the relationship and obligations between a creator and its creation, the concept of innocence and blank slates, the fear of the strange, the burden of consciousness. The creature's suffering was definitely the most intriguing part of this book for me. Victor Frankenstein himself was pretty awful as a character.
In general, the way people throughout the story react to and treat the creature is very over the top and ridiculous in a way that I don't think aged well. Victor's own inner struggle is also often hard to empathize with, in my opinion.
And of course, there are things like the way the creature learns to travel all across Europe and learns to speak sophisticated language so quickly is a bit odd even in the context of this story.
I also can't really say if I find it strange and corny or really innovative that the story is told through all these different accounts from different characters. I mean, at some point we're reading letters in which someone describes the story of someone listening to someone else tell their story in which they listened to someone else tell their story. The layering in this is ridiculous sometimes.
The prose can be a bit repetitive and dull at parts too. Mary Shelley loves to get distracted by describing landscapes for a couple of pages at a time. But there are moments of great prose with really powerful and effective words as well. The final speech by the creature actually hit me a bit.

Overall, I enjoyed this though. It's not a terrible read and it had some engaging and interesting moments. I don't think I'm ever gonna be a big fan of the Frankenstein concept though and that's more because of my personal preferences and less because of the quality of this text. 

 

I'm not exactly sure why this short novella was published. It's set between the first and second novels of Steve Alten's monster shark series called Meg, two books that came out more than two decades earlier.
It's hard to find much about this spin-off gap-filler called Angel of Death: Survival, focusing on the surviving offspring of the original megalodon after it was captured at the end of the first book. Googling around, I saw old notes that there was something like a trilogy planned at some point of which this would have been the first part, but I genuinely can't tell if this is even still planned or if this project was completely abandoned by now.

Anyway, as it stands now, Alten's late short story continuing right off where the original book ended is a pretty lackluster little extra journey. While I was actually genuinely interested in reading about the management and establishing of the giant aquarium tourist attraction that's meant to hold this megalodon baby, the story didn't give enough substance to really hold my attention. Alten attempts to bring in new characters and adds more backstory to some already existing ones, but most of it feels like telling instead of showing in a way that it seems like a rushed waste of potential. At one point he introduces a new character by recapping their entire life over several pages and I just thought this was a terribly dull way to introduce a potentially interesting character. It felt more like reading the backstory notes an author might put to paper before writing a character into the actual story.
The action is also not as captivating as most of it focuses on some random surfers and divers, which doesn't make for much variety. At least one of the diving teams had an encounter with a goblin shark which is a rare thing in fiction and a very cool choice.
Alten also goes a bit too hard when it comes to the romance with this one. While romantic trouble was already a thing in the original novel, here the main character and his romantic interest from that previous book are in full bloom and it makes for a bunch of awkwardly sexual writing. Definitely not Alten's strong suit.

This wasn't terrible though and it had some decently interesting bits. I still really like when Alten writes from the point of view of the animals and the megalodon baby Angel makes for some interesting paragraphs in that regard.
But in the end, this odd bonus novella in the franchise fails to really add something very memorable to the series and doesn't really enrich the already existing elements. 

 

I read Steve Alten's prehistoric monster shark novel Meg once before, around 15 years ago when I was still a teenager. I remember enjoying it a ton back then and I remembered my time with it fondly.
Recently I felt like revisiting it to see if it would still hold up.
I started reading an earlier print at first but switched to a modern version around a third of the way through after realizing that Alten revised and expanded his novel around 2005. The prose changed notably and it's the post-2005 text that I must have read as a teenager anyway.

Meg is probably what you expect from a monster shark book: It's a pulpy creature feature story with b-movie vibes that delivers lightweight entertainment without much depth, aside from the deep sea locations of course.
The characters aren't very sympathetic or that interesting. They serve their purpose to drive the story, but they don't present very engaging development or growth. There is some heavyhanded romantic drama and lots of corny dialog. The relationship between the main character and his cheating ex-wife for example makes for a lot of the central non-shark conflict and it's more dramatic than nuanced. Add to that the new love interest for the main character who is of course at least a decade younger than him, as was the style at the time.
The book really does feel at points like the creation of an older generation, but it luckily never crosses the line into genuinely offensive territory. It's just trashy entertainment and that might not even be despite the flaws, but rather because of them.

But that's not to say the book is just a sinking ship that's fun to observe. Alten manages to write some very fun and over-the-top aquatic action. The giant shark is portrayed gnashing through its victims in surprisingly visceral ways at points and the book offers a lot of neat set pieces.
Hell, it's cool to have a novel that has lengthy scenes at the bottom of the Mariana Trench at all and it describes those moments fairly effectively. The pseudo-science is hamstrung a lot of the time but it usually makes up for that by delivering entertaining scenarios.
The shark is a character herself to a degree as well which I also liked quite a lot. Though I still wonder if Alten was trying to say something about the female sex with this because this book has a lot of angry female characters, both human and shark, and the author likes to emphasize that at points. I think that kinda culminated when

the megalodon gave birth to a couple of baby sharks and immediately ate the only male one

. I don't know what's up with all of that, if there was an intentional symbolism to all of that or if I'm just overthinking it. But honestly, the way Alten wrote (about) women sometimes made me laugh a couple of times. Though to be fair, he also wrote pretty much all prominent female characters (again, both shark and human) as capable, strong-willed, and emancipated, and they were probably the more interesting characters in this book in general.

Anyway, this is nothing one can take very seriously. It's easy entertainment with some explosions and some loose guts. It's fun if you're into creature feature stories and just feel like a quick read. A shark week SyFy film in the shape of a book.
I enjoyed it quite a lot and I might even be inclined to read one or two of the many sequels this apparently got.
But it sure won't be something that will have much of a lasting impact on you, I'm gonna assume. Unless, like me, you read this for the first time as an impressionable teenager and started getting even more obsessed with deep sea creatures and the Mariana Trench afterwards. 

(Quote translated from German.)

Growing up, I was obsessed with this children's/young adult mystery book series called The Three Investigators. It's interesting how this series originated in the US, but was way more popular over here in Germany where it was dubbed Die Drei Fragezeichen (transl. The Three Question Marks). I'm just one of many who grew up with these and there are still kids nowadays that read these book and listen to the audio play versions.
I had a whole bunch of these books and audio play tapes as a kid. This one, The Mystery Of The Invisible Dog - or Die drei ??? und der Karpatenhund which is the title I always knew it as - was one of my absolute favorites in the series. I only had the audio play version of it back then though so this is the first time I actually read the book.

I think what made this one of my favorites back then and what I still really like about it on this late revisiting is that it's a really nicely contained story that's taking place in a single neighborhood for 95% of the time. So a lot of the book is focused on getting to know the residents of the place, learning about their individual relationships, and having the main characters surveil the area while all sorts of odd things go on. It makes for a pretty mysterious atmosphere. I think that vibe came across especially well in the German audio play adaptation I listened to as a kid but it's also here in the book.

The prose is of course a very simple language given that this is a children's book after all but the investigated crime is unravelled in a pretty clever way and it's giving a lot of genuine clues for the young readers to figure things out themselves before they're revealed. There is an element about sleepwalking that's stretched a bit much but otherwise the story is wrapped up well. The way the titular dog comes into play, which is missing and searched for throughout most of the book, is still a simple but very clever reveal that I remember impressed me as a kid.

Reading this as an adult now doesn't make it as suspenseful as it was when I was a kid for obvious reasons, but I still think this is probably a highlight in this series and a good read for younger audiences.

 

I've been looking forward to Elliot Page's autobiography for a while. Not only are transition experiences always interesting to read, I also was really curious how that might affect the life and career of an actor. This book gave a really good insight not only into Elliot's private life but also what parts his acting roles played in this journey. It was actually a bit surprising to me to read which movie productions were the ones to empower and motivate him.

Elliot tells his stories unchronologically, jumping through childhood, adolescence, and adult life, looking at family dynamics, love life, and Hollywood career. It makes for an engaging whole not only because of the personal insight into this man's journey of self-acceptance and gender expression, but also with the added bonus of background stories and interactions with other industry stars.

Read this book and then have a double-feature of Whip It and E.T.. 

 

I never could really get into this and I understand why the opinions about this are so divided.
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke has an interesting, simple premise of following the problematic relationship of two women exclusively via e-mails and chat logs. It's all presented like a true crime text with parts being omitted at the request of the police and due to legal proceedings still going on. All of that could make for a really cool atmosphere and tone, but it never really capitalizes on it. This choice of presentation didn't end up actually adding that much to the story and the way the characters are written, or rather the things they say, felt out of place exactly because of that framing.
All the e-mails the characters send each other are written in this flowery and extensive prose that didn't seem like natural conversations at all. The characters don't just exchange information, they tell each other whole stories. They write walls of texts of professionally edited anecdotes and go out of their way to embellish them with colorful prose. Like two overcompensating actors doing overly dramatic, corny monologs instead of two people having conversations.
It went directly against the true crime framing of candid online correspondence.

Additionally, the characters seem like flat stereotypes of traumatized people, unable to form healthy relationships. The book is way too short to believably paint the characters and actually justify their questionable decisions, which ends up making the extremes rather comical.
It was almost impossible for me to empathize with the main character because she falls way too hard and way too quickly for the obvious and ridiculous abuse that's offered to her without believable reasoning or much of, if any, self-reflection. And with every step she took, I was just asking myself "why?".

And before you know it, the story ends. I didn't feel like I got much out of it. It's flimsily structured torture porn that fails to come across as authentic or believable in any way.
It wasn't the worst book I read though. The core concepts had potential. Also, some bonus points for the parasite/insect stuff, I guess. 

This certainly wasn't an easy book to read. Both because of the heinous hate crime at the center of it as well as the philosophical concept that can be a bit challenging for someone like me who isn't very well-read in those things. It makes for a thorough and interesting analysis of human behavior though.

Gayle Salamon extensively analyzes a transphobic hate crime to recognize how the situation got to that point by following the philosophical thread of phenomenology which focuses on the structures of people's individual experiences and how our consciousness processes our world.
It might sound a bit abstract, as philosophy often does, but it basically looks at how something like unquestioned "common sense" can dictate destructive behavior, how the way we automatically project subjective meaning to neutral objects changes how we interact with them, and how the way we talk about things puts the blame on a victim faster than one might think.

The whole court case is pretty vile. Plenty of the quoted words from the court proceedings are shocking and makes you wonder how these teachers can even still hold a job at a school afterwards. There is unabashed victim shaming all around, sometimes under a thin veil of care. Gayle Salamon does a good job at taking their behavior apart, dissecting the biased contradictions, and showcasing how a non-existent threat can develop through biased interpreting of someone's neutral surroundings leading to a skewed attempt at "protecting" one party from another.

Rest in Power, Latisha King.

 

Blutbuch by nonbinary author Kim de l'Horizon is an autofictional novel about generational trauma, self-discovery, and gender expression. It won the German Book Prize in 2022.

This book plays a lot with language. To begin with, the German language is particularly difficult when it comes to gender-neutral expression, so it is refreshing to read a book that takes the effort to tackle that throughout a full novel. Then past that, the author uses traditional Swiss-German dialect, modern queer talk, and even English to different effects, which showcases how much language changes depending on person and subject. There is something very engaging about a modern voice wielding the language of older generations to make an observation about different lifetimes. The clash of different jargons as the clash of different experiences and perceptions.
The text keeps evolving and changing form as the author seeks to uncover some family secrets, discovers their family's history, and comes to grips with their own relationship to the past and their relatives. Throughout the anecdotes, essayesque self-reflection, and lengthy ancestor biographies, it can seem somewhat aimless at points but ultimately manages to tie it all up very well to make the picture complete.

Blutbuch is unique, it's extremely personal, and it's timely without leaving behind the past. A symbol for the everchanging zeitgeist and a representation of the different kinds of struggles for one's own identity without antagonizing the past.