Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher should be a model of next-level literary adaptation. Rather than just using a particular text as the basis for the narrative, it weaves together quotes, characters and situations taken from Poe’s writings generally to elucidate a larger story. The story it tells, moreover—the fall of the… Continue reading Twenty-First Century Poe: Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher
Author: JK Gravier
J.K. Gravier is a pseudonym for an experiment in dark speculative fiction.
Some blatant self promotion
Some mercifully rare but nonetheless shameless self promotion today—announcements two reviews and a book show!My novel Blood Machines has recently received gratifyingly positive and astute reviews on a couple of very cool cultural sites—these may convince you to commit your leisure hours to reading or listening to it if you haven’t already done so. Taliesin… Continue reading Some blatant self promotion
The Crown, Diana and the history problem
One of the loose themes of this blog is how fiction often fails to mediate reality, and so I’m going to write about the last season of The Crown, specifically the representation of the events leading to Diana’s death. My interest in the Royal Family is limited, but my interest in interpretation is real, and… Continue reading The Crown, Diana and the history problem
Daisy Jones and the Six and Shakespeare’s child
Fiction is a reflection of its era. Current political and social events heighten our awareness of particular issues, and this affects both how our criticism interprets the narratives of the past and how our own stories interpret reality.. All of this is a long-winded justification for writing about Daisy Jones and the Six. I feel… Continue reading Daisy Jones and the Six and Shakespeare’s child
How it started and how it’s going
So, this blog was started, among other things, to promote my novel (although how this is actually supposed to work is still a little murky). To that end, I feel obliged to occasionally make announcements. This is one of them. Recently, my novel received first place in the 2022 Writer’s Digest Self-Published E-Book competition, in… Continue reading How it started and how it’s going
Glass Onion: the last tech bro
One of the things fiction does is to help us understand reality, and by this metric Glass Onion (Rian Johnson, 2022) provides a great service. Having grown up during the tech boom but also being old enough to remember another time, I’ve been continually shocked by the blind worship of digital entrepreneurs, as well as… Continue reading Glass Onion: the last tech bro
The Chess Player Who Fell to Earth
One really good way to draw attention to your blog is to write about popular television shows or movies two years after they were released. So today, I’m writing about The Queen’s Gambit (2020). And as usual, this entry is almost entirely made of spoilers. The Queen’s Gambit was a runaway surprise success for Netflix… Continue reading The Chess Player Who Fell to Earth
Oryx and Crake, post-pandemic and out of context
Among other things, speculative fiction provides an unparalleled forum to consider the long-term consequences of ideas and initiatives. Scientists, sociologists and economists often make predictions, of course, but professional specialization typically requires that such forecasts be tightly focused. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) is a model for how fiction can take a broader perspective… Continue reading Oryx and Crake, post-pandemic and out of context
Top Gun: Maverick and the new sadness
Warning: nothing but spoilers! The expression “vibe shift” basically means a change in the zeitgeist, which is itself a German word that translates to “spirit of the age.” The spirit of the age—again basically—means the defining characteristics of a particular period of time. The term is useful because it’s wonderfully flexible and wonderfully subjective. One… Continue reading Top Gun: Maverick and the new sadness
Blood Machines: Allison Drew
The immediate motivator for starting this blog was to find a means of alerting an always-busy and easily distracted world that I have a novel that needs to be read. And to this end, occasionally including a few posts about the book would make sense. This is one of them. One reader recently asked why… Continue reading Blood Machines: Allison Drew
Travel Only By Night 