Alé Salamán -- LMST345

 Annihilation is one of my favorite movies but now I've gotten the privilege to read the book.  Overall the book is a mix of lots of genres and filled with alluring situations. There's horror, suspence, thrills and there's a great look into self discovery but at what cost. They embark in a suicide mission for the sake of experiencing the upmost sublime -- they find themselves doing research in a private goverment owned piece of land in which there's a scientific phenomenon being expirienced. No one really wins in this embarkation. Due to the unavoidable collapse of the earth's ecosystem and the systems put in place to take care of our society a phenomenon hits a controlled goverment area. In fact, before the set of women went for this expendition, 11 other groups had attempted to go through the same mission in hopes of being able to report something. They all died, from suicide or many cancers collaborating- which I personally found very interesting how the envirome...

 Week 3 - Uzumaki (3+ points) Junji Ito takes a mundane idea of a spiral and elevates it into something horrifying that the town fears and loathes. When they're trying to get out of the city to escape this overtaking curse, they turn into spirals themselves and even in snail form. There's transformative powers that symbolize the possession of grotesque horror in this town. He uses the spiral motif everywhere - there's almost no stone left unturned. Even her hair turned into a spiral at some point. Throughout the story the spiral possesses everything, almost like a disease. Which is interested to read during these difficult unprecedented times that we find ourselves in now. Maybe not the same levels of horror but overall Junji Ito never fails to turn the most mundane events and scenarios and push them into horrific trajectories that are uncontrollable and at a large scale. 

 WEEK 3 - A WILD SHEEP CHASE (6pts)  The protagonist of this book is clearly in a limbo of self-doubt and overall not knowing how to deal with this emptiness that surrounds him. Events transpire that leave him all by himself. Overall he's only experienced severe loss and this book is mostly just a tale on how he dealt with the events at hand. It's an interesting take on the idea of major loss. He lost someone in his early life to a freak accident, got divorced from his wife and his new lover has disappeared. The card's are not on this man's side. Throughout his life apart from these events everything about him is normal and a very mundane and average life which lead him to then chase for the abnormal. The loss of the women in his life has left him in a pool of emptiness and loneliness that lead him to chase something new. He decides to venture off into finding a specific sheep that he can only recognize by ear. I thought it was interesting that throughout the book this ...

  Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice is a compelling novel bringing you the new perspective of what it’s like to be a monster. In a way it gives you a first look into the issues of being immortal and overall the almost human-like issues these creatures can have. In a way this book lightly touches on the more complex and multidimensional character that a monster can be. He isn’t necessarily a character you empathize with especially at first as he was well off and basically contributed to the use of slaves and had his family live in a plantation. In that way, he is not a monster that is relatable whatsoever. Louis de Point du Lac being the vampire who speaks to the mysterious boy interviewer about his trials and tribulations within his transformation from mere mortal man to alluring vampire. He explains to the interviewer about how he for a while had suicidal tendencies due to the death of his brother – which was caused by an argument due to Louis finding out that his brother was ...

  I read the preliminary information about Mary Shelly and how she had quite the tragic timeline throughout her life. One of these tragic events being that she tried to have multiple children and only 1 lived more than 3 years old. Which at the time, I’m assuming it was fairly common for your children to not live that long due to poor conditions. Regardless of that, it made me think about the whole idea and fascination to creating life that possessed Dr.Frankenstein. Frankenstein is basically a book about the creation of man. One could compare the birth of the creation to the attempt of Shelly trying to have her own children.   But that’s just a hypothesis.   Overall, the idea of creating life I think gave Dr.Frankenstein some sort of god complex in which he carelessly continued to disregard the idea that whatever his creation does is something he has to take care of himself. Dr. Frankenstein’s obsession with creating life out of dead matter inevitably backfires on him as...