Two Things Can Be True
Guest post by Jack Boone
“Set ye down, set ye down. Play a round with Barclay Down,” is a chant that will get an appreciative shiver from anyone in the West Virginia town of Clear Holler, and utter bafflement elsewhere.
Continue reading “The Ballad of Barclay Down”
The Snarly Yow is a legend told ’round South Mountain Maryland and the West Virginia Panhandle. It’s a legend that takes its roots from the grim spectral dogs of Wales and the British Isles, that came over the ocean with the miners and laborers who settled in the area, padding through land that saw some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the Civil War. Terrified hunters have sprayed it with shotgun blasts, and baffled motorists have struck it on lonely highways, only to turn and watch it lope off, unharmed, into the darkness. A vast black dog with a red mouth, glowing eyes, and a supernatural resistance to bullets or bumpers, it has never been known to harm a soul or cause any sort of damage apart from the need for cartridges to be refilled, or pants to be changed.
The exception is when the Snarly Yow came to Clear Holler, West Virginia.
What happens when you combine listening to too much true crime and a fondness for cryptozoology? Our next novel, for one. Jack Boone, podcaster of the paranormal, for two. In the Appalachian town of Clear Holler, armed only with a microphone, an EMF detector, and a dangerously open mind, Jack is on the hunt for high strangeness – and a murderer. Even if the only person available to help her solve the mystery is the ghost of the victim herself.
Jack’s story is still in process, but her tracklist is available for snooping.
Quarantine is the perfect time to rewatch old favourites. Or dwell on past sins. And with the end of the road finally, finally in sight, what better time to revisit Supernatural?
If you’re reading this post, you probably don’t need an introduction to the show, or its fandom. Two hot brothers battle monsters and daddy issues while crossing a desaturated America (Vancouver) in a cool car. It was part of the Superwholock trifecta in Tumblr’s heyday, the show that launched a thousand reaction gifs. There was shipping, obviously, and a conspiracy theory that the two lead actors were secretly in love but the network was forcing them to keep it secret. The show acknowledged its fanbase and their deep investment in Wincest and Destiel through an in-universe fandom and never ever making anything canonical.
Continue reading “What’s Dead Should Stay Dead: A Supernatural Retrospective”
No, not our fanmail. It’s a story about horrible celebrities!
Today’s been a rough day for feeling productive. And by today I mean the last several days, and by the last several days I mean the decade that’s been masquerading as the past month.
It’s not super original to be like ‘boy, quarantine’s kinda rough, huh?’ but BOY. Quarantine’s kinda rough, huh?
Or: 3 weddings and a funeral. Weird things happen when you’re a celebrity. Mostly at conventions.
What is this, a crossover episode?
Two critically acclaimed shows about bitter, cynical people struggling towards redemption ended this week and, after watching them both, what stood out was how the ways the characters say goodbye to each other mirror how we as an audience say goodbye to them. Here be spoilers.
Continue reading “BoJack Horseman, The Good Place, and intra- and extratextual goodbyes”
Vampires are a metaphor. What they’re a metaphor for – the parasitic aristocracy, predatory sexuality, Mormon celestial marriage – may shift with the anxieties of the era, but they always represent something.
When Sherlock Van Hellsing asks a cadaverous, sore-covered Jonathan Harker if he has had sexual intercourse with Dracula, you can only wonder if Moffat and Gatiss have made a horrific and tasteless AIDS analogy.
Continue reading “a completely objective and overarching ruling on the quality and value of bbcs Dracula based on watching one episode and then rage quitting”
Sometimes it’s hard to know where and when an idea that transforms your work – transforms your life, even – had its genesis.
Sometimes you can go back over your Google hangouts history and see exactly why you did that, laid out in black and white.
And then sometimes you decide it’s not embarrassing enough that you know; the rest of the world should know too.
Denali Stannard 