Friday, June 14, 2013

Neonomicon by Alan Moore, et al.

I read a couple of good reviews of this book -- plus I like Lovecraft and it's written by Alan Moore -- so I requested that the library purchase it. I apologize. I wasn't surprised by the sex and violence because, again, it's Alan Moore. I was surprised that I didn't care about the characters. At first, I disliked them. By the end, I couldn't even summon up that much feeling for them. They are universally racist and misogynistic. (Maybe that's supposed to be a comment about Lovecraft himself. Maybe Moore was trying to capture that feel from the original stories. I don't know. I do know that I found it off-putting.) We know little about any of the characters, except that the female FBI agent is a recovering sex addict. Lest you forget, poor reader, it's mentioned every couple of pages. The book's premise, that Lovecraft was writing about real aliens and a real threat with cults that have survived to modern times, is interesting. It could have been great. Unfortunately, it wasn't even good.

Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon

I'll start by pointing out that we don't actually have this in our collection, although it is obtainable through interlibrary loan (which is how I got it). Nor do we have the movie based on it, Night of the Lepus. We wouldn't get it even in the unlikely event that it's available for purchase, based on its Rotten Tomatoes rating of a whopping 11%. Read the critical reviews, they're right on target. (In my defense, I'm pretty sure I caught the movie on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Also, it was in a Jeopardy answer. I got the question right.) The movie is about giant, carnivorous rabbits in the American Southwest. The book, set in Australia, is about the dangers of political corruption and an uninvolved electorate. The rabbits serve mostly as a domino. A rancher has a rabbit problem, so he extorts help from the politician he got elected. Then things go horribly wrong. Then they go fantastically right for Australia, which extorts the rest of the world into doing what Oz wants under threat of bio attack. Then things go horribly wrong again. And from there, they can only get wronger. For the most part, though, the rabbits aren't particularly important. It's a scary creature movie. It's a political satire book.
Here's the movie poster: