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Book Review: Buffy: The High School Years: Parental Parasite by Kel McDonald, art by Yishan Li

Buffy: The High School Years: Parental Parasite by Kel McDonald, art by Yishan Li

Dark Horse Comics, 2017

ISBN: 9781506703046

Available: print, Kindle, and comiXology ebook

Into every generation, a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one.

So begins the story of Buffy, Angel, Giles, Willow, and Xander chasing down a demon who possesses adults, driving them to only take care of it. The demon takes the form of an adorable young child, but it as we all know with demons in the Buffy-verse, it is anything but. At the same time, Buffy and her mother are struggling with their own mother-daughter relationship. Joyce wants to spend more time with Buffy, but the Slayer heeds the never-ending call to protect Sunnydale. However, when Joyce becomes hypnotized by the child demon, Buffy faces a new kind of battle—one to save her mother from the clutches of evil. Can Buffy and Scoobies defeat the demon before it kills Joyce?

This book is set during season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and is the third installment of the Buffy the High School Years series. The artwork is great and very manga-ish. This is definitely a good supplemental YA title if you’re introducing your kids to the Buffy-verse. The relationship between Buffy and Joyce is depicted as strained, but they clearly love each other. Buffy’s devotion to her Slayer responsibilities is obsessive, which I seem to remember her desire to protect overrode her need for education or familial duties to her mother in the television series. Frankly, it made me want to revisit the series. Admittedly it has been quite some time since I’ve seen it. Pick this one up if you want to explore content set in the early years of the Slayer! You won’t be disappointed. Highly recommended for die-hard Buffy fans and newbies alike.

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

 

Posted on November 3, 2017 by , Reply

Book Review: H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories, adaptation and art by Gou Tanabe, translated by Zach Davisson

H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories, adaptation and art by Gou Tanabe, translated by Zach Davisson

Dark Horse, 2017

ISBN: 9781506703121

Available: print

Gou Tanabe, known in Japan for using manga to adapt literary works, has adapted three tales of the macabre in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories. This volume includes “The Temple,” “The Hound,” and “The Nameless City.” Each of the tales includes information regarding when the story was written and published. Dark Horse hopes to publish further volumes of Tanabe’s Lovecraft adaptations in the future.

In “The Temple”, a German submarine crew is driven to madness by a mysterious influence. The captain eventually discovers an underwater temple. Will he, too, fall prey to the madness? Two decadent young men are obsessed with the practice of grave robbing in “The Hound”. Their midnight escapades lead to a deadly discovery. An explorer in the Arabian desert discovers an ancient city when he passes through a mysterious doorway into “The Nameless City.” What he sees on the other side is pure nightmare fuel.

H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories is the first manga I have read by Tanabe, and I need to pick up more of his work. This is a must for Lovecraft fans. The dialogue is minimal, leaving Tanabe’s artistic work do much of the communicating. The artwork is all in black and white which lends to the oppressive and macabre atmosphere of the source material. Recommended.

Contains: images of the macabre

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

 

Posted on October 20, 2017 by , Reply

Help a Reader Out: Are Myths Fiction or Nonfiction?

Interestingly, this question popped up in keyword searches a number of times, so I’m going to briefly address it.

“Are myths fiction or nonfiction?”

The answer probably depends on who you ask and why. I imagine that if you ask an atheist, you’ll get the answer “fiction”. But in the wonderful world of the Dewey Decimal System, books (and other media) on mythology are in the 200s, the category for philosophy and religion. So for straight mythology or books about mythology, it’s considered nonfiction. Poetry (like Homer’s Odyssey will generally end up in the 800s, with other books of poetry. Yes, poetry is considered nonfiction.

Novels and stories inspired by mythology usually end up getting pulled from the 800s and end up shelved with fiction, though. So if you’re asking because you want to know where Rick Riordan’s books fall on the shelf, you’ll find those in fiction. And if you are asking about a graphic novel, it kind of depends on the library. Some libraries will shelve all graphic novels under 741.5, the number for that format, and some pull the graphic novels into a separate section and shelve them by either subject (my daughter’s elementary) or author (my son’s middle school).

So the answer is that, especially in the library, it’s complicated. And sometimes it is kind of hard to figure out. If you’ve encountered Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods”, it probably falls in nonfiction, even though it is written in the annoying contemporary voice of a fictional character(that’s just my personal opinion, my kids love it) and “updated” versions of many myths. But the novels will end up shelved in fiction. Ultimately, though, the myths of a culture are stories of their gods, and their religion, and as long as people believe in gods, mythology is nonfiction.

It occurs to me that, given that this site focuses on horror fiction, someone reading this might think “Well, what about the Cthulu mythos? That’s a mythology, right? Why isn’t Lovecraft in the 200s?” As it was originally the invention of one person recognized as a writer of fiction, and how that person felt about religion is publicly known, I don’t see why it would be anywhere except in fiction. If you do know a person who worships the Elder Gods, please encourage them to seek help.

Posted on October 19, 2017 by , Reply
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