2018: The Year in Bedlam
Welcome to the 2018 edition of my annual Year in Bedlam THE BEST movie round-up
PURGATORY
1998 was the year of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, a war movie that allegedly broke new ground in its depiction of the ugliness of combat. Few seem to know about the ’98 Russian movie PURGATORY, which far outdid Spielberg’s film in grit, gore and sheer unpleasantness
LITTLE HEAVEN
Here Nick Cutter, of the well-received horror thrillers THE TROOP and THE DEEP, tries his hand at a genre epic of the type popularized by Stephen King and Robert McCammon, with mixed results
NIGHT SHOW
Rereading the book, I found that its initial hold remains largely intact; NIGHT SHOW is nothing if not a page-turner, with a consistently inventive narrative and some mighty potent nastiness.
NATURAL ENEMIES
This taut and compact first person shocker is simply one of the most disturbing novels to emerge from the 1970s.
HERE COMES A CANDLE
As he often did, Brown adds many eccentric and unexpected elements, including a warped sense of humor and a pointed political angle, as well as quite a few experimental touches that place HERE COMES A CANDLE in a category of its own.
THE GAS
The idea of a man-made drug causing people to lose their sexual inhibitions had been done before THE GAS saw print and after, but no other novel took the concept as far as Platt did.
THE DEMON
This is my favorite novel by the late Hubert Selby Jr., who’s best known for LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. THE DEMON occupies a unique place in Selby’s oeuvre, being (I think) his most interesting book but also his most problematic.
CREATURES OF THE POOL
Of the thirty-some novels by Ramsey Campbell, this is only the second to be written in the first person.
THE SHADOWED MIND
An insane asylum set South African horror-sexploitation oddity from 1988 that was heavily informed by FAREWELL JOHNNY, the granddaddy of South African horror/cult films. Taken on its own terms THE SHADOWED MIND is agreeably bizarre, though not nearly as deep as it purports to be.