RIG Monsters Online Reading Journal Spring 2021

 A strange feeling overcame me as I read the stories of H.P. Lovecraft: "The Call of Cthulhu", "Pickman's Model", and "The Outsider". To use a contemporary idiom, I wasn't feeling them. I was disappointed in myself for not feeling them. and I wondered why I wasn't. I'm not slighting Mr. Lovecraft's imagination. It's deep and vivid. I'm not slighting his writing. It's classic.  But for the first time in my life, I didn't feel the style fit. It wasn't that I did not get scared at all or at the least disturbed by the ideas and images I was reading. I just wasn't awestruck and frightened out of my mind, and I couldn't figure out why at first. His subject material was frightening, although not so much in the case of "The Outsider", which read like his take on the Frankenstein monster.  What I came up with is the RIG-Monsters class is to blame for my not feeling the way I thought I should as I read Lovecr...

  Timothy Sáenz Blog Post – Godzilla (2014) Due: Friday, 16 April 2021 RIG – Monsters Prof. Scott Johnson MFA in Writing Popular Fiction If you are having trouble getting to sleep at night, play the movie, Godzilla, the 2014 version, and you will tumble into a deep sleep, possibly even a coma. If ever a film existed full of explosions, earthquakes, crumbling skyscrapers, and monster roars that could substitute for counting sheep, it is this one. So you may have to turn the volume low enough. A morality tale about mankind’s naughty flirtation with nuclear power, Godzilla will put you to sleep within 45 minutes, which is about how long it takes before we get a real glimpse of any of the monsters that appear in this film. Here is the problem with Godzilla and all its iterations except the first. Godzilla began as a serious monster story hampered only by the limitations of Japan’s postwar film industry. After that initial entree, it became a children’s movie franchise stern ...

  Timothy Sáenz Blog Post – Snow Due: Friday, 9 April 2021 RIG – Monsters Prof. Scott Johnson MFA in Writing Popular Fiction Snow is a horror story with subtle threads of science fiction woven into it and penned by Ronald Malfi. This classifies it as a piece of speculative fiction set in a small, isolated, fictional Iowa town in the midst of a massive Christmas Eve blizzard. Malfi keeps up a furious pace and piles on complication after complication as a band of four travelers try to get help for their dead Jeep Cherokee by walking to the nearest town, called Woodson. It turns out Woodson needs their help. It has been invaded by snow-like creatures under the cover of snow. The creatures use their sharp, scythe-like arms to tear open a portal in the backs of humans by which they enter and take control of them. The possession of adults is horrible enough, but the effort leaves children faceless and cut off even from the invaders. Malfi’s imagery and ability to conjure ...