octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is disappointingly sloppy, I'm afraid. Greg's the DNA lab tech, he doesn't analyse soil samples. Sara doesn't call Grissom "Gil," especially not this early in the series, and the acronym plural for "Crime Scene Investigators" is CSIs, not CSI's. Plurals don't have apostrophes! 

The CSIs start doing science here, so immediately it's more interesting than the first issue for me! Catherine especially, as she analyses bullet wounds (and probably blood splatter). She did that a lot in the series, if I recall correctly. Still not a fan of the art, though. 

"I take psychic phenomenon seriously" says Gil Grissom, but I cannot take a Grissom who does not know the difference between phenomenon and phenomena seriously. Let alone the whole psychic thing... doesn't seem very scientific, does it? 

The art's not that great either. Some of the characters are nigh on unrecognisable. 

This has been on my to-read list for a while, and it seemed perfect for the cosy fantasy task of this year's Read Harder challenge. It was a good pick - today was pretty rainy, so it was nice to curl up inside with what turned out to be a warm, light-hearted read about a queen and her knight gone off on a quest to find the queen a girlfriend. There's also dragons and a wicked sorcerer and food allergies and it's all set in a Jewish secondary world, which was fun. (I appreciated the glossary at the back of the book for Yiddish and Hebrew words.)

It's just an enjoyable, fluffy read where everything turns out well for everyone. Happy endings all round! 

Mildly interesting, but none of the cases seemed especially compelling. Perhaps it's just me: arson and domestic terrorism don't tend to be the sort of mysteries that get me really excited, and this also tends a little too thriller for my CSI tastes, what with explosions and gun battles and all. I like this series for the science, and while there's a lot of that here it's all in service of cases I don't care too much about. Perhaps the most interesting one was Nick and Sara and the forest fire, but that's because I like the outdoors and environmental crime does strike me as compelling; this particular plot was supporting only, though.

What did strike me was that Catherine was, at one point, referred to as a former medical student. Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but that doesn't seem right. Medical and laboratory science I could buy, because she was always good with blood spatter, but otherwise that might have been an editing fail. 

It's really a good thing I am not a detective. I was fairly sure that the obvious antagonist could not be the villain, simply because it seemed too easy: Christie was actively presenting him as the murderer, albeit a sympathetic murderer due to mental disturbance, one who didn't really know what he was doing, but she's never that obvious. It would have been an entirely new departure for her. (An interesting departure, no doubt, as Cust was so confused and so unwell that he was quite unlike her usual culprits.) And yet, suspecting that he was innocent, I had no idea who wasn't. I forgot, I'm ashamed to say, to suspect anyone else at all.

Instead, I was quietly marveling over the character work here. It seems to have taken a substantial step up from the Christie books I've read previously - from Hastings worrying about his thinning hair to Megan Barnard and her rather awful honesty... I was so impressed by it that I genuinely forgot to try and figure out whodunnit. That was a surprise. With Christie, it always is. 

This focuses on the first three seasons of the original CSI, and primarily consists of extended synopses of the episodes. I suppose that makes it useful as a reference, if not especially fascinating - I'd rather watch (or more accurately, rewatch) an episode than read a two page summary of it. What's more interesting, however, is that each episode has an associated behind-the-scenes section, generally half to one-and-a-half pages long, that has commentary from the cast or crew. Sometimes that commentary is on character development, other times it's on how the story originated, or how certain scenes were filmed. It's new information, essentially - stuff you don't get from watching the show. No surprise that these were the bits I most enjoyed reading. 

I came across this book while looking for resources with which to write a chapter on the Finnish horror film Sauna. There's no focus on that film here, but the book was so interesting I found myself reading it anyway! And in doing so, have added a few more horror films to my want-to-see list.

I find ecohorror fascinating anyway, but I've never really considered it in nationalist (or, in this case, regionalist) contexts before, bar some rather shallow observations on the genre in question. I certainly hadn't considered it in a Scandinavian setting, which is unsurprising as - apart from a brief summer picking strawberries in Denmark - I've never been there. I live on the other side of the world, actually, but even so the cultural presentation of the Nordic countries as outdoorsy, environmentally-friendly communities has percolated its way through my brain anyway. Bigelow takes this apparently widespread belief and explores how Nordic ecohorror films undermine that perspective in various ways. Occasionally he does wander a little too far into eye-glazing theory for my taste - as in the discussion of mesh and meld in Midsommar - but the lucidity of the chapters on Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre and Shelley, especially, make up for it. 

This collection of standalone comics from the 1950s is proof positive that social awareness in pop culture has a longer history than many would give credit for. (I continue to be annoyed at people complaining about Star Trek becoming "woke", for instance. It always has been!). There's a lot of emphasis here on the evil of prejudice, especially racial prejudice, and unfortunately some of the letters received by the comic book company, and reproduced by them, show how necessary these stories are. Said company wasn't playing around: they had Opinions - particularly about bigotry and mob rule - and they were going to share them.

As much sympathy as I have for their beliefs, however, the stories, while perfectly adequate, could be somewhat predictable. Most of them have a twist at the end, and in most cases I saw it coming. There's not a lot of subtlety here either. That being said, it's still a likable and interesting read, and sets a foundation for a lot of comics today. 

The first half of this is a solidly average horror novel. I don't quite call it Gothic romance, as to my mind that's "horror plus romance" but the romance here is entirely one-sided, and all on the side of the obsessed narrator. I almost wish it were Gothic romance, because it would be the first of its kind that I've read, I think, where the narrator/protagonist was a man. 

Unfortunately, he was a very stupid man, and the total collapse of the second half of the book was entirely down to him. An academic at Oxford, he becomes so enamored with a married woman who is - apparently - periodically and violently possessed by the ghost of a dead actress, that he covers up her killings and intends to take the blame for them. That makes him partly responsible for her actions in my book, and he's so weakly, morally bankrupt, and so miserably useless at any rational action - every time he has a choice, he makes the wrong one - that I was hoping to see him hanged, just to be shot of him. Alas. There's an abrupt and dreadful ending, as the central metaphor is pushed to breaking (burning) point, and gormless Harry gets off scot free. 

Unless the ghost gets him. We can only hope.