It’s rainy where I am but I’m hoping it’s nicer where you are. But if not, don’t worry, there’s a plethora of entertainment here (and also, Leverage: Redemption just dropped).
Black Magic and Dark Secrets: Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching
Immanuelle Moore is a teenage girl who lives in Bethel, a town gripped by an authoritarian religion. The Good Father of Bethel’s faith is opposed by a Dark Mother, a demonic figure associated with witchcraft and devilry. Immanuelle has been treated with suspicion from birth as her late mother, Miriam, was a witch. Yet she…
Remembering Charlee Jacob: Season of the Witch
Season of the Witch was nearly the last Charlee Jacob novel to be published (only one more, Containment, was to follow), yet it was the first that she wrote. She penned it in the ’80s, after which it remained a “trunk novel” until 2016. Jacob evidently revised the manuscript to some extent prior to its…
Vampires on the Margins: Forbidden Desires
One reason for the enduring appeal of the vampire as a concept is its erotic element, and this is something that manifests in both heterosexual and homosexual terms. From the lesbian vampire exploitation films of the seventies to the queer undead of Anne Rice’s bestsellers, modern audiences have come to expect vampires to exist outside…
Remembering Charlee Jacob: Vestal
Charlee Jacob’s vampire novel Vestal was published in 2005, the same year that Stephenie Meyer gave vampires a newfound popularity with Twilight. Jacob had tackled vampires before, of course: her debut novel This Symbiotic Fascination was in part a vampire tale, and she also wrote enough vampire short stories to fill an entire anthology, The…
Remembering Charlee Jacob: This Symbiotic Fascination
Having spent years charting a landscape of atrocity, degradation and twisted ecstasy across her short fiction, as discussed in the previous post in this series, Charlee Jacob made her debut as a novelist in 1997 with This Symbiotic Fascination. This novel tells the story of two employees at an electronics shop, Tawne Delaney and Arcan Tyler;…
BOOM! Pubwatch: November 2019
Welcome to winter, comics fans! The snow (and ice) have already started up here in Canada so I’m getting ready to hibernate for the next five or six months. Basically I’m stockpiling books, comics, and snacks so I can leave my home as little as possible. I’ve started this process with not one, but two…
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 9: Atom-Age Vampires
As far back as the nineteenth century, certain writers had tried to demystify vampires by coming up with scientific explanations for their condition and behaviour. James Malcolm Rymer’s ramshackle Varney the Vampire introduced – and later abandoned – the notion that its main character was a man resurrected through galvanism. Charles Wilkins Webber’s Spiritual Vampirism…
DC PUBWATCH – February 2019
The biggest news this month came from the annual Comics Pro conference held right before convention season kicks off. Dan DiDio was there to talk about the company’s future. Among things talked about were the rumor of a massive cutback of the publishing line, and DiDio confirmed that it was true, but the cuts have…
Book Beat: New Kids Book Festival and Mary Oliver’s Passing
Happy Thursday Booklovers! Christa here, reporting on your weekly book news from the coldest capital in the world. Wherever you are, I hope you’re staying warm this week and spending some time curled up with a good book and your drink of choice. It was a busy news week this week so let’s jump right in!
NYCC: Escape the World
On the Friday of New York Comic Con (NYCC), as I descended into the depths of the Javits Center in search of Artist Alley, I had one thing on my mind: how could I balance having fun at this con with my justified worry about American politics? With that in mind, I toured Level 1,…
Rosie’s GIANT SIZED Dynamite Pubwatch (March/April/May/June)
Hello, comic book adventurers! It’s me Rosie, back once again with your regular Dynamite comics roundup. We here at Women Write About Comics are dedicated to unpacking the complex parts of the industry and unwrapping the underwhelming gift that is comics so we can all enjoy/despair about it together! So here we are with another…