Work In Progress

I haven't been reading as much as I wanted to, between a lot of freelance work and college applications (and Bella! the new addition to the family, who is only named Bella because I vetoed Fluffy -- see below for a picture). But we have been watching a lot of horror, some of it good and some of it ... not.

Caught The Broken on SciFi (I refuse to use their new ridiculous logo/spelling), and was really pleasantly surprised. Lena Headey and Richard Jenkins are in it, which is a huge plus, and for a movie where not a hell of a lot happens, the sense of creeping dread and unease was palpable. Stylish, spare, and really scary.

The Changeling, on the other hand, really didn't live up to its hype. George C. Scott is always good, and the scenery and the house were gorgeous, but it felt dated, and the ghost story ended up not so much with the sense-making. Brief shivers early on and then eh.

Don't Look Now, which is supposed to be a classic, really, REALLY baffled me. Even more dated, and incredibly pretentious, and completely incomprehensible. Especially when we got to see as much of Donald Sutherland naked as we did Julie Christie, and the sex scene we sat through was epic (not in a good way) and reminiscent of amateur porn. Almost an hour in, nothing had happened that was remotely creepy. We turned it off.

I thought I was being too hard on it for about half a second, and then realized that there are plenty of older movies that hold up beautifully, including The Haunting (the original) and The Uninvited, so.

We're about to watch Penny Dreadful, too.

And now, Bella! 

I read an excellent blog called Bookshelves of Doom, written by a Maine librarian who loves YA fiction (among other things). She posted a link to a reading challenge on another blog that initially began as a sci-fi site and has broadened its scope, and it's exactly right for this time of year! (Well, on purpose. Duh.) 

It's called the R.I.P. Challenge, aka Readers Imbibing Peril, and it's all about reading stories that haunt, terrify, and spook, tales that poke into the dark corners and wake the ghosts and explore the unknown. Which is what I do every year at this time anyway, leading up to Halloween! That's when I revisit Shirley Jackson  and some of my favorite Stephen King stories, and when I look for new horror novels (and also pull out my DVDs of The Haunting and other scary favorites).

As the challenge states, the goals are pretty simple: 

1) Have fun reading.
2) Share that fun with others.

Simple, right? 

It's running now through October 31st, and started September 1st (actually a day or two before that, I think), but it's early days! If you want to pick some books about things that go bump in the night (and they don't have to be YA, to be clear), you can simply read them and enjoy them, or you can sign up and post reviews, as well.

Which is what I'm planning to do! So far I'm planning on:

The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
Magic For Beginners, Kelly Link
Valiant, Holly Black

But I may try to pick up a few more! Check out the link above -- there are actually different ways to tackle this, if you want to be more organized about it.