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Musings: Doing What You Love with Someone You Love, by Kirsten and Miles Kowalewski

 

 
This entry was written at the request of my son Miles, previously referred to here as the Monster Kid for privacy reasons (Miles is just a few months older than Monster Librarian, and inspired our Monster Movie Month project in July 2012. A  little kid doesn’t need his name out there on the Internet) There are some really cool blog posts in the July 2012 archives for this blog) At 20, he is no longer a kid and while he’s home from college he wanted to share how important it is to him that the two of us share the experience of watching and talking about horror movies together. We’ve each written a little about it here, first from my point of view and then from his. Mine is a bit wordy, but make sure to read what he has to say. It’s so cool to see what he thinks about the time we spend together sharing this interest! If you’ve ever wondered how horror-loving kids turn out, mine is kind, curious, loving, generous, and enthusiastic about his interests.

 

Kirsten: 

I am more of a horror reader than a horror movie watcher. Being married to a horror movie lover made movie nights challenging, to say the least. But my son has not just followed in Dylan’s fandom footsteps but has even gone further, majoring in media production and screenwriting, and working on short films for Radiance, Ball State University’s immersive learning experience in filmmaking. Since Miles was a kid, he has had an interest in monsters and scary movies– in fact, one year, Dylan helped him shoot a short monster movie during his birthday party. As a teenager Miles read about and took classes in screenwriting for horror movies, learned to write film criticism, connected with people online, and even to conventions.

 

I have learned that if you want your kids to spend time with you, it makes a difference if you take time to share their interests, so I watch and talk about horror movies with Miles. I love getting to share the experience with him, and because it’s interesting to him, he makes it interesting, and even exciting, to get into it with him. I probably text him now with more horror movie related content than I do cat videos (college students apparently need a steady diet of cat videos). I owe many thanks to James A. Janisse of the Kill Count, who has made it possible for me to talk about movies intelligently with him even when I haven’t watched them through.

 

Almost all of the movies I’ve seen in theaters in the past year have been with Miles, and this actually was a great year for watching horror movies in a theater. I’m probably not representative of the general moviegoing population, but in addition to Sinners, four of the five movies I saw in theaters were horror movies, and worth the ticket price (28 Years Later, Weapons, The Long Walk, and Frankenstein). I really think that they are a lifeline for movie theaters. I saw the first three with my son, and watching a movie on the big screen in a movie theater is a great experience to share with someone who really is interested in being there and enjoying it.  I love Guillermo del Toro and everything Frankenstein, and although Miles was at school, I could go back and forth with him about cinematography, directorial choices, special effects, storytelling, and all the other things I’ve learned from him about filmmaking, especially horror, even though we weren’t able to see it together.  I saw del Toro’s Frankenstein with my mom, who loves the book but doesn’t like violence or horror, and there is a world of difference in the discourse when you are sharing the experience with someone who isn’t open to it.

 

Since Miles is in college now, we mainly watch movies when he’s home on break, and this year we’ve watched It Follows (a favorite of his), Pearl, Get Out, Psycho, Cure, and Black Christmas together.  We also watched Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead again, because we learned that the Monroeville Mall, where parts of Dawn of the Dead were filmed, will be demolished later this year. We actually intended to visit this weekend while he is on spring break, but then I discovered there’s actually going to be a final farewell there in June, with original cast members in attendance, so I think we’re going to wait for that!  I watched them casually in the past, but now horror movies mean more, because they’re something Miles and I share.

 

 

Miles: To me, this whole experience has been getting to do something that I love with a person that is into and enjoys the same genre as I do. We both have different specialties in regards to the horror genres, across multiple mediums. I enjoy movies more then I do books and for Mom, it is vice versa.

 

I specifically enjoy watching horror movies with my Mom because I have always been fascinated with movies as medium and horror as a genre ever since I was incredibly young. Plus I also think that it may help that it is something we do together, to varying degrees of enjoyment.

 

I find that with these movies we watch, it helps us bond and grow closer together. I don’t think Mom would have willingly watched any of the movies that we did with anyone else (maybe except for Daddy, but he was into some pretty intense stuff). And given how unique and special my mom can be with these kinds of things, it is always a treat to do.

 

In summary, you can dice it many different ways. It could be family bonding, the continuation of legacy, film analysis, criticism and appreciation, or maybe just laughing and screaming at whatever is on our screen for the night (most likely all of the above). But at the end of the day, it is something that I always have found brings me a sense of warmth and comfort in a world that always seems to be getting darker and colder.

 

 

Posted on March 4, 2026 by , Reply

Musings: Discovering A Brave New World

bookcover for Brave New World

 

The Monster Kid just took an unofficial poll of his peers (mostly college freshmen) and asked if any of them had read a book in the last year. With one exception, they said they had not read a book in years. How they graduated high school without reading a book is unclear to me. Certainly my kids have had novels assigned, and I know they’ve read them. Maybe they aren’t counting fanfiction, webnovels, or graphic novels?

 

This was part of a discussion I was having with him over the book he had just discovered– a revelation! After years of reading and rereading 1984, he has just discovered Brave New World and is comparing them to each other and current events. To discover a book that is a source of wonder is a rare thing once you have passed the gates of childhood, where everything you encounter is for the first time.

 

Looking back to books we loved in the past often reveals the flaws we missed when the story first swept us away (how did I miss the antisemitism in Oliver Twist?} especially once we have encountered a wider context, both in the world around us and through other books we’ve read (I’ve suggested Julia, The Handmaid”s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, The Parable of the Sower, and others to him), but once he pulls his nose out of his schoolwork and stack of screenwriting books, I guess he will have to discover those on his own as well. It’s pretty exciting to see a face light up like that, regardless,

 

I would love to see everyone read widely, to discover that book that suddenly clicks and carries you away, and then be able to come to terms with its flaws, if you can. It saddens me that so few of the Monster Kid’s peers have given themselves that opportunity. I hope that every one of you do, as well.

Posted on March 1, 2025 by , Reply

Musings: The Stranger Inside by Jennifer Jaynes

The Stranger Inside by Jennifer Jaynes
Thomas & Mercer, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1477817919
Available: Paperback, Kindle edition, Audible, Audio CD

Well, it’s happened. The Monster Kid, soon to be 12 years old, picked up, secretly read, and was completely engrossed in his first adult horror novel (why he thought he needed to hide this from me is beyond my understanding, but maybe keeping it underground is part of the allure). Technically, it’s the second one he’s read, but he was unimpressed by I Am Legend (I think he didn’t actually understand what was happening, which I am grateful for). And I suppose purists would say it’s more of a mystery thriller than a horror novel, but it was sent to me for review, and it has some pretty terrifying moments. The Monster Kid is a re-reader; once he finds a book he’s really fascinated by, he reads it over and over. I note that he has been sneaking it to school in his backpack, so obviously this is one of those books.

A Stranger Inside introduces us to the Christie family: widowed mystery writer Diane; her adopted 15 year old son, Josh; and her college-aged daughter, Alexa, who struggles with anger at her mother, grief, depression, and addiction. Diane and Josh have just moved to the college town where Alexa attends school, and Diane is struggling to adapt to small-town life and changing family dynamics. She’s also finally trying to move beyond her grief and anger at her husband’s suicide, and starting up a new relationship. Add to this mix the sudden murders of girls at Alexa’s school, and you have a recipe for disaster.  What else would you expect in a town named Fog Harbor?

Jaynes’ slow-building characterization of the men in this story is what makes it creepy to me (obviously, this is not what appeals to my kid). Every single one of them gives off that “wrong” feeling, which only escalates as the events of the story, and the murders, continue. It is amazing to me is that Diane, a mystery writer, takes forever to pick any of this up. There’s Lance, a volunteer at the suicide hotline where Diane volunteers; Wayne, the grocery store manager who invades personal boundaries; Rick, her “perfect guy”, a former sniper who suffers from PTSD and has a houseful of guns. Even Alexa, who spends a good chunk of time in a drug-and-alcohol induced stupor, has more of a clue than her mom does.

While he picked up on the total lack of likability of any of the men in the book, I’m pretty sure the Monster Kid missed out on most of this, for obvious reasons. This is a kid who fast forwards through movies to get to the action scenes and giant explosions. This book is a really fast read, and if he did something similar, in skipping the character-building parts, that could explain why he sped through it in an evening.  For him, it was the suspense, ratcheted up in part from not being able to tell which person in the book was the killer, the pacing, and the interspersed scenes of the killings, from the killer’s point of view. These aren’t graphically gory, but there’s definitely a focus on the stalker’s thrill at the chase that could leave your heart pounding.  The killer was a character that completely surprised the Monster Kid, although based on his short, non-spoilery summary, I guessed it pretty quickly. The final scenes of the book are not ones I would have ever guessed, though.

This is an adult book, and there are a few sexual situations, although most of that is off-screen (can I say off-screen when writing about a book?). His primary pickup from this was the phrase “The room smelled like sex and french fries”, with the focus on the french fries. There’s also a date rape, which we see from Alexa’s point of view, which is pretty muddled since she’s drugged.

It’s kind of astonishing to me that, with all the horror novels in this house that he has hidden from view because of the covers or that even are just floating around, the Monster Kid picked this one, and is enthralled with it. It’s a sign that he’s growing older, I guess, and if he had to choose a book to start with, this wasn’t a bad one. In fact, the most disturbing part to me is the teenage boy and his role in the story, and maybe that’s because it hits so close to home. If he stays with books that have this level of violence and sex, it’ll be a relief. But I’ve been hearing a lot of mutterings about Stephen King…

 

 

Posted on May 19, 2017 by , Reply
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