Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart is best known as the novel that was adapted into the movie Hellraiser, which follows the book closely. Seeking otherworldly pleasures, Frank Cotton performs a gruesome ritual and solves a puzzle box, which opens a doorway to another world. Cenobites, scarred and mutilated creatures, appear and drag Frank into their Read more…
She is one of those adventure novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that are often considered boys’ books–novels like Tarzan, Treasure Island, War of the Worlds, and Haggard’s own King Solomon’s Mines, which have been read by generations of boys and influenced much of our popular culture. (Would there have been an Read more…
For an infamous book that climaxes with the protagonist attending a satanic Black Mass, Huysmans’s The Damned is terribly, terribly boring. Durtal hates the modern world in which he finds himself (especially its literature), and grows obsessed with the middle ages in rebellion. While surrounded by others who also feel out of step with the Read more…
While Amerika is certainly a Kafka novel, its overall plot is very different from his other novels, The Trial and The Castle. Here, the protagonist Karl is not struggling against an amoral bureaucratic machine, but bouncing his way through a surreal American landscape reliving variations of the family drama that lead to his initial exile Read more…
I knew nothing about Camus’s The Plague, and I had always assumed the title was metaphorical, so my first surprise was to discover that the plague of the title was an actual outbreak of the bubonic plague in the Algerian city of Oran. The book details both the characters’ and populace’s emotional, physical, and philosophical Read more…
A drunken braggadocio, a love-sick young noble, an alchemist with a recipe for poison, a master of disguise armed with a cure, an ugly boy nicknamed Hobgoblin, a pretty puritan girl loyal to her mistress, a naïve newlywed, an ambitious earl fighting his own best instincts in his climb to power, an evil knight, and Read more…
