Review: The Fury by John Farris

  This is another classic horror novel. It made Farris a household name after the release of the Brian de Palma movie in the seventies. That was long before I was born or could read, but it reached me through the grapevine of an eager reader. I searched endlessly for challenging and daring material, and this was one of the earliest I found.

  It starts off as an action-story, but quickly moves away from that, into far more satisfying waters. It isn’t a horror-story, not really a genre story at all, and I quite simply love that, love that, too. John Cassavetes played the sinister highly placed government man in the movie, but he had lots of great original material to work with. It is no hero-story. The reality in the story come off as quite cruel and gritty. In a typical Hollywood story, the boy’s father would have succeeded in his grim mission with flying colors, but he doesn’t. The boy and the girl are the main protagonists, even though it doesn’t look that at first. There is no moral here, or if there is none, it’s far different from the usual boring, mainstream stuff.

  We are presented with a reality beneath the somewhat pleasant daily existence where there are no rules, no mercy. We are drawn into a world of agents and victims, and both casual and deliberate violence. Powerful people want to become even more powerful by exploiting an emerging power, but this power is both beyond their understand and reach. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. The before mentioned highly placed government man realizes that to his peril.

Poor man’s way of enjoying art

  There is one part of the bit-torrent and free download of music and movies that hasn’t been mentioned much, amazingly so.

  It’s a major equalizer in so many areas.

  It gives people that wouldn’t otherwise be able to pay for experiencing music and movies a great opportunity to watch and listen and not give a fuck about the inflated official prices set by wealthy and oppressive movie moguls and record producers.

  Giving them the finger is so much fun, on so many levels. Recently, for instance the show The Blacklist was pulled from the more law-abiding torrent sites because of yet another horrid court order, but I just switched to a torrent provider that doesn’t give a shit about court orders and was still able to download it.

  There are still segments of the Internet where lawlessness rules, where people reject unjust laws on a matter of principle, and I love that, just fucking love that.

My Game of Thrones review

This is both about the novel and TV-series.

We experience old men and women, young girls and boys, and everything in-between in a brutal world where everyone can be a victim. There is sex, nudity, open homosexuality, boys sucking mother’s nipples, girls killing, girls being beaten and crying until they’re red in the face, decapitations, really scary walking dead, dragon babies suckling at a woman’s breasts and so on. This is a great far cry from «family friendly» stories.

This is daring and truly mature storytelling.

There is a sense of menace right from the start, a mature mood usually not present in many rather childish fantasy novels. We know something bad will happen and that it will rock our world and challenge our perceptions. Characters perceived as main characters may not remain so very long and not be long for the world. Bad people may survive and thrive, and good people may not.

I wasn’t initially very excited about the story, since I’m not very interested in what’s going on at royal courts and such, but the story is so well crafted and so engaging that I tend to forget my original misgivings.

It’s also well translated from novel to film. The few changes are mostly due to insufficient production funds. Large battle scenes, for instance are mostly left out. We only see the result, not what happened. A clear disadvantage to be sure, but not enough to put me off watching the series.

It has a very realistic or at least believable feel to it and I am hooked.

The ending, the revelation of the Dragon is clearly one of the greatest ever.

The book of books

I want to write a book, non-fiction or a film, a documentary, describing in detail, from the ground up the building blocks of the current society, how everything, every single detail is flawed, is fundamentally wrong.

The wrongness reveals itself to me piece by piece, blocks by blocks, like a slow-marching band. I want to reveal it all, from the ground up. It’s easy, really, since you notice it everywhere. The book or the film becomes a matter of logistics, not fact-finding. Those with open eyes have no trouble finding facts.

I want to interview people all over the world, both «experts» and people, about both the decline in the environment and in human society as a whole. There is no lack of illustrations looking at it from either angle. Food, health, green areas and life itself are fading away, slowly, quick as lightning, like the dew before the sun in the morning. There are those claiming the current human society, civilization itself has become a ravenous machine gobbling up everything of true value, leaving nothing but destruction, disintegration in its wake. That’s a more than a true observation.

From the smallest of truths to the big issue we know the truth.