Week 7 Night Circus

This week I read Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and I didn't know what to expect going into the book but I once I started to read I couldn't stop. This is an interesting twist to the typical Circus theme because it's at night which makes it stand out compared to the rest. The book starts off with sharing details about Hector Bowen who is considered a big character in the book. Hector walks in one day to a young girl in the room, he starts to look at her and realizes that it's his daughter. He immediately becomes a father (which means OH NO) because her mother sent her with a suicide note. With this, the author introduces that his daughter Celia has powers because she breaks her cup without even touching it.

The author did a good job with presenting issues right off the bat. Hector becomes a father and he's not quite sure how to be a father which creates challenges in his life. He discovers his daughter has magic powers which starts to intrigue him.

Week 6 The Hobbit

This week we got to read a fantasy novel: The Hobbit, I had never read it before this class. I always enjoyed the Hobbit film, so It was nice to finally get a chance to read the book. Bilbo Baggins is the main character of the story and he is considered the hero of the journey that they embark on. I enjoyed watching his character in the movie after reading the book because you can really get to know him better. What I like about Bilbo is that he is just a normal hobbit hanging out in his miniature house, when a group of elves and the wizard arrive at his house and take over. Bilbo doesn't know what to do because he never invited them over. It ends up working out in his favor because, Bilbo goes on a journey with them. What makes the story fun to read is all the characters within the book. Bilbo meets all kinds of creatures on his journey to the Mountain. At the end of the journey, Bilbo becomes wise and confident in himself. He saved the day in many circumstances in which he saves the dwarves and other creatures. Bilbo was truly the hero of the story with his bravery.

Week 5 Aunt Maria

After reading Aunt Maria, I can say that the witches in this story are archetypes. I find that their characters are strong powerful women and can manipulate. In our society witches are not looked at as good people. Women in general with power are not always looked at in this society. In this book, Aunt Maria is almost relatable because she is a cute old lady with a manipulative personality, someone that most of us have in our lives.

Week 4 Monster Island

This week I decided to read Monster Island by: David Wellington and I didn’t really know what to expect since it was a week-by-week blog by David himself. This was written back in 2004 and he would post a new chapter as soon as he could. I found Monster Island to be kind of funny in the sense that it was trying to be scary but it wasn’t. The story was based out of New York City and the vampires basically took over New York. The great thing about this series is that David would write back to the readers as they made comments on the chapter.

I have never read anything “new weird” before so this was a first for me but I found the new weird genre to be more interesting to read than a regular horror book. I specially liked a part of this series when David describes the girl scouts to be demonic and scary and the main character was trying to hide from the girl scouts because they were zombies. This series is considered new weird because it’s got horror and sci-fi elements to it without being too scary. I also like that new horror tends to have more of a parody background to it which makes it more enjoyable to read. I really ended up enjoying this series because of its parody, and its here and there scary remarks.

Week 3 Kwaidan Stories

This week’s reading was interesting to me because I have never read Asian supernatural narratives before. I ended up reading all of the recommended short stores. After reading them and watching the movie I noticed that they don’t really focus on evil like many other horror books and films, they focus more on morals. In the short stories they only hurt the character if they did not keep their promise, if they don’t keep their promise something and will happen to them.  I didn’t notice any murdering or hurting others just because like most scary films and stories. In the movie I wouldn’t consider the woman of the snow to be evil because she only killed that man because he would die anyways from old age and being too cold in the snow. She was very set on morals and she held Minokichi to his promise to never speak of that evening she killed the man. Minokichi of course did not keep his promise so she ended up leaving him after having 10 years with him. The worst part of it all was that she left her kids whom I think in a lot of ways made her out to be a terrible person. While I was watching this I did consider her kind of evil until I sat down and thought about the moral of the story and why she acted the way she did.

I didn’t expect to enjoy this weeks reading as much as I did, I had never thought about reading anything like this before. The film was really interesting too, I would like to finish watching the entire movie to see how her character progresses, as (evil) as some would say.  Our version of horror or gothic is defiantly different; we have a different way of expressing it through our films and books. We focus more on it being scary instead of it having a moral story. I rarely find a scary movie with a huge background and moral story background within the film. I would be interested in reading more Asian super natural stories in the future.