Mental Illness is the Twist! A Review of The Last House on the Needless Street

Spoilers Ahead

The Last House on the Needless Street is a horror book written by Catriona Ward that follows Ted, a suspect in a missing child case from 11 years ago and is told through multiple points of view including one from Ted’s cat Olivia.

The book has been highly praised by numerous high profile authors including Joane Harris, Joe Hill, and the King of horror himself, Stephen King. King had even gone on to state that he hadn’t read anything this exciting since Gone Girl.

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Defending Holden Caulfield

I know, I know… the book does not need to be defended. It’s still one of the most popular and relevant books but I guess I’m just tired of seeing posts like this on Reddit every other fucking week. Literature, like any art form, is subjective and people might like it or dislike it for any reason they want to but most criticisms I’ve seen online of Catcher in the Rye feel superficial for some reason.

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Arbitrary Gestures and Bhitta ko Namaste

I was a huge reader back when I was young, going through books like they were nothing. Of course, my young mind couldn’t really grasp the implications of most of them, so they’d just slid off my brain. You can’t really give The Brothers Karamazov to an eight-year-old and expect the little bastard to get anything.

That’s not the case for everything, though, and some stories get burned into your mind so clearly that you still remember it fifteen years later. Sometimes those are pretty unassuming too. Not well-known classics or bestsellers, just some random story that grabs hold of an impressionable mind.

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Favorite Reads of 2020

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

I’ll be honest, this was not a great book but this was a much-needed book for 2020. Stuck in our homes, with our own thoughts, some of us losing employment, we were at the same point as the main character of this book is at the beginning. And the ride that the book takes us along to is a comforting one and we can’t help but be hopeful for Nora and for ourselves – that even though this life might come with its problems and regrets, we will be able to make it through.

This is an easy read even though it kind of slows down in the middle. I would suggest this book to anyone who is feeling a bit down and has regrets about the past.

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Some Horror Book Recommendations for this Halloween

The spooky month of October is here, made extra spooky by the fact that this entire year has been a long fucking nightmare. With that said, what better way to cope than by reading about poor bastards that have it worse than us.

So, here is a list of some of my favourite horror books of all time. I’m sure everyone and their pet Labrador has read Dracula, Frankenstein, At the Mountains of Madness, and all the other famous ones at this point, so I’ll try to avoid those. I’m also going to try to avoid talking about the actual plot for the sake of preserving the tension.

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Best Books to Escape into During the Lockdown

We are suffering from a global pandemic and while we all have the urge to refresh the news site to continue being updated on the latest news related to Covid-19, using a book to escape the situation for a while might be a good idea.

While escapist literature does not have a good reputation, escapism is not necessarily a bad thing. By escaping from the reality for a little while, we also ourselves to rest and then rejoin the world in a better shape than how we originally started. As C S Lewis eloquently put it, “The only people who hate escapism are jailers.”

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Revisiting Harry: Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 1 (Dumbledore Parties for 12 Hours Straight)

Now that I’ve been confined to my home by the current state of things, I think there’s no better time to revisit my childhood. A specific part of my childhood to be exact, as well as the childhood of millions of others around the world; the Harry Potter series. Even if you are Patrick Star and live under a rock, under the sea, there’s zero chance that you don’t know this absolute juggernaut of a series. My plan here is basically to go through the series and try and see if the revelation that wizards used to shit themselves has ruined Hogwarts for me.

Speaking of shitting oneself, I’ll haven’t really been keeping track of Rowling’s tweets or the bits of canon that were added through Pottermore so the discussions will be limited to the Book Canon. Putting the quality of the additional bits of worldbuilding aside, this is more about taking another look at the series that I experienced as a kid and not about the series in its current state. Without further ado, let’s get right into Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (not the Sorcerer’s Stone, which is dumb)

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