Deputy Sheriff Tom Lord and local oil company manager Aaron McBride have beef. Lord signed over rights to McBride’s company Highlands to drill for oil on his West Texas land - who basically scammed him. After Lord gets some revenge by publicly beating McBride in front of his staff, the two have a bitter fight that ends with McBride dead and the feud continuing as McBride’s widow sets out to get vengeance on her dead husband.
A man manipulates his wife into thinking his lies are true and that she’s going crazy, like her late mother. But where does he go every evening and who’s making that noise in the flat above - or is that another figment of the wife’s supposed mania? Then a retired cop appears one evening when the husband is away with a tall tale of murder most foul…
FBI Agent John Jones is caught in an explosion which somehow leads to him having a martian’s voice in his brain - as you do. Is it real or is he nuts? Well it’s pretty fucking obvious what the answer is. Exciting. Then people start randomly doing horribly destructive things, that John and the martian try to stop - and then the comic just becomes this, over and over. It’s quite tediously repetitive.
Ricky Lawless is in the hole for $25k with a psycho bookie. To make him even - even Steven - he’s gotta wait in the room of a fancy hotel for a high-rolling gambler to return with their winnings and then rip them off. Ricky’s problems start when he gets bored and blows his nose off - except it isn’t coke he snorted!
A summary of the evening redness in the west - A praise chorus in sotto voce - The Judge judged - A deeper meaning questioned - A master prose stylist - An experiment in chance - A middling verdict on a soon-to-be-established classic - People who’ve read the novel will know what I’m doing here
There isn’t much of a story to Jim Thompson’s The Grifters and that’s mostly why I didn’t like it much. The main characters are an estranged mother and son, Lilly and Roy Dillon, who are both con artists, or “grifters”, who rip people off, and that’s about it. Roy’s seeing an older woman, Moira Langtry, who’s also a grifter on the sly and an occasional hooker.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-82) was a West German filmmaker who, in his short life, wrote and directed 38 feature films, several shorts and TV shows, including what many consider his masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and even produced films for other filmmakers. A one-man film studio, he created a new movie every 100 days. But his unhealthy lifestyle ended his life early when he died of a cocaine overdose at age 37.
WW2 has ended, the state of Israel is yet to be founded. In the years between these two events, a teenage Holocaust survivor, Elisha, is recruited into a Zionist terror cell to fight for an independent Jewish state in Palestine against the hated occupiers, the British. When one of their own is captured and sentenced to death, they capture a British officer in retaliation and propose a hostage exchange. If their comrade is executed at dawn, then so will the British officer - and Elisha will be the one to pull the trigger. Can Elisha reconcile going from being a victim of the Nazis to suddenly finding himself in the same position as they were - and will he go through with the killing?
Charlie “Little” Bigger arrives in the small town of Peardale in Long Island, posing as an older student enrolled at the local college, but is really there to whack a key witness in an upcoming mob trial. What’s a hitman to do in a small town? Apparently not much - including the very killing he’s been hired to do! Welcome to Snoozy Night by Jim Thompson.
Moan is one of Junji Ito’s better horror manga collections. It still has the same problems of other Ito books - character motivations aren’t so much underdeveloped as ignored and the endings are bonkers and often abrupt, while the shortest stories, included at the end almost like B-sides, are always the most forgettable - but the stories here are more entertaining than in others.
The Land of Sweet Forever is one of the literary events of 2025: a new book by Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, comprising 8 unpublished short stories - two of which feature her immortal character Jean Louise Finch - and 8 previously published nonfiction pieces.
Joe Wilmot runs the biggest movie theatre in his small town - but things aren’t going well for Joe. Stuck in a loveless marriage and with business failing, he and his wife Elizabeth hatch a plan to commit insurance fraud: take advantage of their double indemnity insurance by faking Elizabeth’s death in a fire then claiming the cashout. Except Joe isn’t as smart as he thinks and the people he’s wronged over the years are lining up to make sure this time he gets what’s coming to him…
Laura has a one night stand with a stranger she never sees again and gets preggo. Deciding to keep the baby, she raises her daughter Emma as a single mother, though luckily she belongs to an upper class Manhattan family which makes things easier. Laura & Emma is the story of the mother and daughter over the course of 15 years.
Lordy, life is difficult for some people, eh? Kabi Nagata’s previous autobiographical mangas have focused on her difficulties with her homosexuality, then becoming a drunk, then dealing with pancreatitis as a result of said boozing, and now her latest book, My Twisted Eating Disorder, is about her bulimia! She even mentions at the end of this book that there are other struggles she’s avoiding discussing so I dread to think what other burdens this poor woman is going through.
