The season’s upon us.
It seems that the run-up to Halloween has already gotten underway. There is a distinct taste of autumn in the air already — as in pumpkin spice. Yeah, well, if it’s wrong, I don’t want to be right. I am fully on board with turning a quarter of the year over to trekking into the perilous timbers of Fennario.
In that spirit, here we have The Marsh King’s Daughter. I’m a perfect mark for wilderness psychological thrillers, especially ones that call up Karl Edward Wagner’s Sticks. So…
Here’s the caper:
A woman with a secret past will venture into the wilderness she left behind to confront the most dangerous man she’s ever met: her father. In the film, Helena’s (Daisy Ridley) seemingly ordinary life hides a dark and dangerous truth: her estranged father is the infamous Marsh King (Ben Mendelsohn), the man who kept her and her mother captive in the wilderness for years.
When her father escapes from prison, Helena will need to confront her past. Knowing that he will hunt for her and her family, Helena must find the strength to face her demons and outmaneuver the man who taught her everything she knows about surviving in the wild.
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Dates & Dead Guys is working the same territory as Frontier Partisans — and very well, too. There’s been a multi-part series on the Apache, including this one, which dropped on Sunday. Like I said, the season’s upon us…
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Clan Cornelius will return to the Deschutes County Fairgrounds Monday night for Paranormal Cirque.
Lady Marilyn was resistant because the players apparently stalk the audience and pull the old haunted house scare stuff, and she HATES that. But she watched a Central Oregon Daily piece shot by our son-in-law Jarod Gatley and was won over.
▶️ Inside the Paranormal Cirque, at Deschutes County Fairgrounds this weekend
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August 29 brings us Jonathan Maberry’s new Joe Ledger.
Joe Ledger and Rogue Team International plunge into mortal peril as this new and deadly arms race threatens to ignite new wars throughout the Middle East.
After years of searching, a new cave filled with Dead Sea Scrolls is found, and among them are bizarre books of actual magic. Terrorist groups and multinational corporations scramble to acquire these treasures in the hopes that magic is the true WMD of the 21st Century. But everyone who goes near those scrolls goes insane. The fabric of reality is shredding. Is this the result of ancient magic, or is it a new bioweapon that fractures the mind of anyone exposed?
Cave 13 pits Joe Ledger against warring factions of ideological terrorism, corporate greed, and massive international crime syndicates in what might well become a new Age of Miracles.
Matthew says
It doesn’t seem like Autumn here in Colorado. It’s pretty much still summer.
When I was a kid, my dad worked for Texas Instruments, this was Dallas I think, and they would have one of those haunted houses. Scared me to death the first time. Not so much the latter times. Of course, I was really easy to scare as a kid. Now, I am harder. Largely, because I consciously decided not to be easy to scare. (Not that it is impossible to scare me.)
I really enjoyed the video on Apache witchcraft. I tend to look for rational explanations first, but I am open minded. Largely, because assuming nothing supernatural is real seems like a baseless assumption.
JimC says
I think that being open to the inexplicably uncanny is quite rational.
Matthew says
A lot of things are rational that “rationalists” write off. I knew a guy (online) who investigated hauntings. He genuinely believed something we did not understand. He was clear that there might be a scientific explanation for it and not necessarily the spirits of the dead, but it was a real phenomenon. I also have a cousin who lived in a purportedly haunted house who actually did not believe in ghosts even though weird things happened. Namely, balls of light floating around which see saw. Maybe it was some weird quirk of physics or maybe something else is going on.
J.F. Bell says
Interesting premise for The Marsh King. Moody and overcast, and Daisy Ridley isn’t hard to look at – though I’d be remiss to omit how badly I want want a word with the idiot teaching (or allowing) their charges to use the modern low-ready carry anytime a long gun comes in play.
Autumn is the finest of seasons. What three days we get here, anyhow. I’d be all for making Halloween a monthlong affair – help to offset the three month crime against humanity that is the ever expanding oilslick of Christmas, but mainly because there holds such fascinating promise and peril in an autumn wood that that finds an equal no other time of year.
The blood-memory of one’s forebears clad in wolfskins in the dark forests of middle pre-Europe carries long. Wherever you go, some piece of you never forgets. Knowing too the curtain between this world and those gone is thinnest with the long-off whisper of winter’s coming cold and a hint of woodsmoke across the fields.
A latent reminder of tests we cannot survive in failure, some of this world….some not.