An Early All Hallows' Eve Extravaganza - The Haunted Looking Glass

I'm celebrating Halloween a little earlier than usual this year, due to a few weeks of planned travel. Still, in true Shangrila Towers tradition, we're going to feature the best the spooky season has to offer. Tonight we'll look at a collection of supernatural stories that I read on my vacation.

If you're a bookworm visiting downtown Charleston, West Virginia, you should check out Taylor Books, a cool independent bookstore with loads of unique and local titles to peruse. I was particularly impressed by the store's dedicated rack of New York Review Books. NYRB publishes eclectic and lesser-known titles from authors old and new, and they're not afraid to publish horror and fantasy.

On the rack, I found The Haunted Looking Glass, an anthology of ghost stories from a murderer's row of 19th and 20th century writers, including Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker. Each of the stories was selected by artist Edward Gorey and given creepy new frontispieces. Most of these tales are a century or older at this point, but they still hold up, and in some ways are a refreshing break from today's horror.

Miscellany: Country Roads EDC

I normally don't take much with me when I'm flying, but I made an exception for my West Virginia vacation. I'd be taking the back roads and ranging the byways of the Mountain State for a week with my friends, and it wouldn't be prudent not to be armed. So, I bit the bullet, paid the fee for a checked-in bag ($30 each way), and toted in a whole bunch of hardware (in full compliance with state laws and TSA regulations, natch).

From left to right:

• Fallout Vault Boy Funko Pop! (#53) - The whole trip was inspired by Fallout 76, which is set in a post-apocalyptic version of West Virginia, so we used this as a prop for our photos.  Bringing the Vault Boy out served as an instant icebreaker and conversation starter. While most of the time you want to blend in when traveling, sometimes it can be advantageous to be recognized as a tourist...we fell in with an impromptu meetup of Fallout fans at the Flatwoods Monster Museum, and we later got interviewed by a TV news station in front of the Kenova Pumpkin House.
• SlimFold MICRO softshell wallet
• SIG P365 in PHLster Skeleton AIWB holster, loaded with Federal HST 124 gr. 9mm - If the assignment is to pack the most firepower in the smallest package, the SIG P365 is ideal. I'm not sure if a gun this common merits a full review here at Shangrila Towers, but from my experience, this is one of the best subcompacts on the market.
• SOFT tourniquet (in PHLster Flatpack tourniquet carrier)
• Keys (with Wazoo Survival SOS Micro whistle, Maratac AAA flashlight, Leatherman Style PS, and Maratac Split Pea lighter) - All of this gear is TSA-approved for carry on (the Leatherman does not have a knife blade)
• Casio G-Shock watch
• ESEE-4 - As a "just in case" item, I toted the ESEE-4 knife. It concealed surprisingly well in an OWB sheathe, and I trust it since I used it hard in a wilderness survival course.
• Shivworks Clinch Pick
• SureFire Stiletto Pro

By the way, West Virginia itself is a fine place to visit.  Fresh air, friendly people, and plenty of country roads...

An Early All Hallows' Eve Extravaganza - Barbarian

I'm celebrating Halloween a little earlier than usual this year, due to a few weeks of planned travel. Still, in true Shangrila Towers tradition, we're going to feature the best the spooky season has to offer. Tonight let's talk about the sleeper hit horror movie of the year, Barbarian.

Barbarian is one of those flicks that relies heavily on narrative twists, so describing anything more than the first 10 minutes spoils the fun. Suffice it to say that the movie follows a young woman who is double-booked at an Airbnb with a stranger; against her better judgment, she decides to stay the night:

My friends and I often joke that horror movies would be shorter if we were in them, as the most obvious solutions to the problem ("Don't trust him!", "Don't go into the basement!") would cut the story off quickly. Barbarian suffers from that problem in spades. The film is well-acted (Bill Skarsgård would make a great Norman Bates) and well-made (the throbbing score is as good as anything this side of Carpenter), but writer-director Zach Cregger doesn't bother to lampshade obvious plotholes and bonehead decisions. It's a tense ride, but one that regrettably doesn't stand up to closer scrutiny.

Rating: 6/10

Miscellany: Condition White EDC, 2022 update

 

I'm behind locked doors in the office this weekend, but I still like to keep the basics onhand.  From left to right:

• Keys (with Wazoo Survival SOS Micro whistle, Maratac AAA flashlight, Victorinox Manager, and Maratac Split Pea lighter)
• SlimFold MICRO softshell wallet
• POM pepper spray
• S&W 642 Performance Center (in 1st gen PHLster City Special holster)
• SureFire Stiletto Pro flashlight
• iPhone SE (3rd gen)
• SOFT tourniquet (in PHLster Flatpack tourniquet carrier)
• Casio G-Shock watch

An Early All Hallows' Eve Extravaganza - It Came from the Desert! Vol. 1

I'm celebrating Halloween a little earlier than usual this year, due to a few weeks of planned travel. Still, in true Shangrila Towers tradition, we're going to feature the best the spooky season has to offer. Let's look at the latest additions to my Spotify Halloween playlist, "Mulliga's Halloween Horrorfest."

"All Hallows Eve" by Type O Negative

This is a heavy gothic metal jammer that closes Type O Negative's fifth album, "World Coming Down" (well, aside from a cover medley of Beatles songs). The album was reportedly written during a particularly dark period in frontman Peter Steele's life when some of his family members passed away, so the song's bleak subject matter is unsurprising (a depressed man makes a pact with Satan to bring back his dead love).

"Nosferatu" by Blue Öyster Cult

"Don't Fear the Reaper" is the Blue Öyster Cult song most people put on their Halloween playlists, but as much as I like cowbells, this track fits the season a whole lot better - dark echoing production, and a story inspired by Bram Stoker's Dracula. 

"Hocus Pocus Voo Doo" by Big Bob Kornegay

I discovered this one from the soundtrack of the recently-released Hocus Pocus 2, the sequel to the Disney cult classic. The song's title is obviously perfect for the movie and the season, but even more intriguing is the artist - Big Bob Kornegay, a little-known blues and doo wop singer sometimes called "the Mystery Man of R&B."

"They Are the Munsters" by Rob Zombie

Rob Zombie's remake of The Munsters has gotten mixed reviews (I loved the show as a kid and thought his version was absolutely terrible), but at least we got a good soundtrack out of it, including this midtempo number done up novelty-Halloween-song-style.

"The Demon," by Fever Dog

I found this one from a great new compilation album, It Came From the Desert!, Vol. 1, which collects Halloween-themed tracks from Coachella Valley artists. It comes from glam rock band Fever Dog, and if you're either (a) old enough to have lived through 60's and 70's bands like Led Zeppelin or (b) old enough to have lived through the turn-of-the-millennium 60's and 70's nostalgia wave that brought us Almost Famous (and the song by fictional band Stillwater that Fever Dog is named after), you'll probably like this one.

TV: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

I'm not breaking any new ground when I say that the December 2020 launch of CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 was an unmitigated disaster.  The game was buggy, unfinished, and in some cases unplayable, all in spite of the brutal year-plus crunch period the studio higher-ups demanded. But as surprisingly bad as Cyberpunk 2077 was, it did spawn a surprisingly good anime, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, now streaming on Netflix:

Edgerunners follows David, a "street kid" struggling to survive in a megacorporation-dominated metropolis called Night City.  After an accident causes him to drop out of school, he throws in with a crew of "edgerunners" - mercenaries who take on outrageously dangerous jobs for the corporations for equally outrageous pay. But as David rises through the ranks of this dystopia, will he lose his friends? Will he lose himself?

Edgerunners was produced by Studio Trigger (Little Witch Academia), and it features beautiful, sometimes-chaotic animation and a dazzling score. The series has a melancholy tone reminiscent of anime like Cowboy Bebop - a tragic revenge tale with a bad end that you (and the characters) can see coming a mile away. The excellent ending credits theme, "Let You Down" by Dawid Podsiadło, pretty well captures the tone of the series: