What's spookier than doing a CYOA book with a live bonus episode audience? CHANGING THE COURSE OF HUMAN HISTORY! Actually, this adventure wasn't TOO spooky but we did meet our least favorite passenger on the Titanic: Jessica.
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This week we revisit a classic Spooktober trope, the haunted house! Richard Matheson's Hell House definitely does not belong in the upper echelon of haunted house fiction - though it's a page-turner that forwards some interesting theories about the causes of haunting, it's also gratuitously sexually violent in some ways that don't feel great!
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This week's episode, on Thomas Olde Heuvelt's English-language debut novel Hex, is a good reminder: don't accuse a woman of being a witch, kill her, and then taunt her as she despondently traipses through your small town. Bad things will happen. This seems pretty self-evident but apparently it's not.
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R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series has been spooking tweens since 1992, selling millions of copies and spawning numerous offshoots and film projects. This week we discuss one of the earliest in the series: Say Cheese and Die!
Find out what happens when a group of kids stumble upon an evil camera and just can't. stop. taking. PICTURES!
We apologize in advance to any fans of the early 90s Ford Taurus. We kid because we love.
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What's scarier than an authoritative government that censors and corrupts its artists? The literal devil! This week we're talking about The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, a seminal work in the 20th-century Russian canon and an exploration of just how weird stuff needs to get for the devil to introduce you to Pontius Pilate.
Spooky talking points include witch cream, vices, and Joseph Stalin's Haunted House.
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Welcome to Spooktober 2018! Our first book this year is Carrie, Stephen King’s first published novel. Even if you know what happens—and you have probably at least encountered the pigs-blood-prom-night thing through cultural osmosis at this point—the way King builds to and follows that iconic scene keeps this book plenty spooky.
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After reading a whole bunch of books, we’ve finally gotten to the odyssey part of the Odyssey! Giants, dead people, sort-of-goddesses—these books have it all.
Just like Bella can't resist her vampire beau Edward, we couldn't resist returning to Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. So we sharpened our fangs and grew out our wolfbeards for a lengthy discussion of the second book in the series, New Moon.
We bemoan the dearth of quality humans in Bella's life. We discuss our #TeamJacob leanings despite some concerns about his "Nice Guy" persistence. And we express our frustration with a book that doesn't WANT to be a metaphor for power dynamics despite being about a teenage girl DEALING WITH SUPERNATURAL MONSTER BOYS.
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What can be said about Thomas Pynchon's postmodern classic Gravity's Rainbow? Well, it's nearly a thousand pages long so what CAN'T be said, am I right??
Join us for a slightly longer than normal conversation about sexual antics, post-war war machines, and the difficulty of Difficult Books About Difficult Men.
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Louis L'Amour's The Walking Drum, a historical novel set circa the 12th century in Europe and the Middle East, is less concerned with being an adventure story and more concerned with telling the reader about worlds that are different from their own. Mathurin Kerbouchard isn't always the most complex character, but the things he learns, the places he goes, and the people he meets all come together to form a novel that evokes American Westerns but is set far away from the American West.
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