A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay Well, we're in the latter half of the summer now, the halfway point having been this past Monday. By the way, there was no blog post then because the previous Wednesday was an Insecure Writers support group (IWSG) blog hop. If you haven’t done so yet, you can read my contribution to it here . However, the summer is really flying by like a trapeeze artist! Speaking of which, my childhood summers were full of circuses. I loved going to the circus! Until I learned of the dark side of many of them. I was eventually disillusioned of the way many of the animals were treated. Still, I can’t help cherishing my memories of visits to the circus.  So, as an adult, I’ve turned to the alternative. One that also often has a dark side but in a different sense: the nouveau cirque (‘new circus’). This type of circus is often inspired by the sideshows, also known as "freakshows", of traditional circuses of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Even so, they tend to have a much...

The promotion poster for the 1960 movie adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" which starred Vincent Price. Photo Credit: Wikemedia Commons    Our Book-To-Movie for November is now crossing into December in which I apologise for. However, like myself, I’m sure many of you were too busy to read many blogs during the Thanksgiving weekend in which I hope you all had a great one. I didn’t post this during the week either because I was busy getting caught up on things that I got behind on mostly due to the holiday. Here’s November’s Book-To-Movie in December. In a Book-To-Movie , we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. We’ve reviewed many Roger Corman film adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories here in the past. One we haven’t reviewed yet is his 1960 adaptation of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”. One of the most distinguished features of Poe’s horror tales is his morbid style in both setting and character. Vincent Price...

Credit: Wikimedia Commons /Harry Clarke   Warning: There are unavoidable spoilers in this review. The only way to avoid them is not to read the review (until you’ve read the book and seen the movie, of course). Edgar Allen Poe is not only known as an early author of American horror but also America’s first detective writer. His short story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, combine elements of horror and detective fiction. The story contains gothic elements, a killer ape and methodical crime investigation. The earliest full-length movie adaptation of the story is Universal’s 1932 version directed by Robert Florey. In this movie adaptation a mad scientist is added to the story who does more of the killing than the ape, yet the original basic plot is maintained. The Short Story Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” involves a couple of gothic amateur detectives, one by the name of Auguste Dupin and the other the narrator who, as with many of Poe’s stories, is mostly left unnamed. The two...