‘One Deadly Summer’ and the Boundaries of Desire and Mania
There's almost never a moment in One Deadly Summer that doesn't recall a crushing nostalgia, using tone and texture to evince a sort of empathetic longing.
scribes and screens
Single White Females: How Far Will an Incomplete Woman Go to Obtain Her Sense of Self?
Much in the way the women of Persona and 3 Women assimilate into lives of their objects of affection, the women of Single White Female experience a similar fatal mutualism.
Home Alone: Laird Koenig’s ‘The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane’
Novelist Laird Koenig managed to capture the world of children with an exactitude that is rare nowadays. His children are often sagacious -- and sometimes they're sociopaths.
The Hunted and the Haunted in ‘King Stakh’s Wild Hunt’
Deeply baroque and shamelessly foreboding, Uladzimir Karatkevich’s King Stakh’s Wild Hunt is a crowning achievement of Belarusian gothic.
Murder for Two: Oedipal Death-Cycles in ‘The Eye of the Beholder’
Behm turns the detective novel first on its head and then sideways before shot-putting it across a terrain of Żuławskian terror; its film adaptation is an equally nerve-wracking descent into oedipal destruction.
Litanies of Death and Desire: The Works of Alain Robbe-Grillet
Often exploring the haunted depths of dissolute sexuality, Alain Robbe-Grillet reframes the ideas of longing and desire through repetitious narratives.
The Fictions of Anxiety in ‘The Last of Philip Banter’
An examination of internalized fears, The Last of Philip Banter explores the social culture of the working-class through a careful dissection of mental illness.
Portrait of a Family in the Throes of Freudian Panic
An electrifying story of deadly obsessions and poisonous pedagogy, Pin captures perfectly the dread and unease of '80s American suburbia.