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Escapism in Coraline

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This week I read Neil Gaiman's children's novel, Coraline.  I had previously seen and loved the movie but never sat down to read the book. The thing that struck me about this novel is the same thing that struck me in the film; not the fact that it's pretty scary for a children's book, something Gaiman is now known for, but the sadness of how ignored by her parents Coraline feels. It's incredibly relevant to many people and it just hits you in such a way that you can't shake it. The entire novel then turns into a form of escapism. Coraline uses this alternate world or dimension as a form of escapism from her seemingly uncaring parents. Why else would she just blindly accept another mother and father with buttons for eyes if not for the fact that they are everything she wishes her parents and world to be like? I certainly can't chalk it up to her being a child as Coraline seems to be pretty smart. Despite all of the adventure and horror in this novel, it's...
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'The Distance of the Moon' Was a Weird Read

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I chose to read Italo Calvino's short story, The Distance of the Moon', for our Literary Speculation section and it was....bizarre. Surely not the weirdest thing I've ever read but it certainly turned into something I wasn't expecting. It starts with someone older telling one of those "back in my day" sorts of stories about how the moon used to be right upon them and starts to go into the finer details of exactly how that worked. This lore is what hooked me in. It started to get a bit weird when they went into this "milk" that the moon apparently produces and how they would harvest it. That didn't throw me off completely, though, as it was still giving part into the lore of the moon and these people's relationship with it. This is also when the story started to shift more into a weird love triangle revolving around the narrator, his deaf cousin, and a married woman, and this is where it lost me. What began as a story about a people and their ...
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I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is not what I expected

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So for this week I read Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream , and I must admit, I picked it solely for that title alone as it is just so darn relatable. I have no idea what I expected, or if I even had any expectations, but what I ready certainly wasn't it. It took me a second read through to completely comprehend the story, especially given that you start placed right within it without any context, and even then I'm not sure if I've grasped everything. At first I was not a huge fan of the story but rereading it and understanding the complexity of it all has made me appreciate it much more. It truly is a very dark and horrifying story when you get down to it. The idea of AI's taking over, set on destroying and/or enslaving the human race, isn't new by any mean but the way this story handles it - I'm not sure I've seen anything like it before. Almost any other time you see humans manipulated by technology in this way, it is generally at th...
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