(I failed to post one of things last month, so I’m gonna do it now and backdate it. Deal with it!)
The Suicide Motor Club, Christopher Buehlman
After March, I was very much on a Buehlman kick. At this point, I’ve read every novel he’s written and I’ll read anything new he puts out.
The Suicide Motor Club is pretty wild: not spooky and disconcerting like Between Two Fires or Those Across the River; it’s more of a World of Darkness fantasy… but that’s not a bad thing.
It’s got vampires, vampire hunters, nuns, and a loose connection to The Lesser Dead, which I also quite enjoyed.
How it Ends
I decided to go on a Netflix queue purge for a couple of weeks in March: just started at the back and either watched it immediately or removed it. And, if something sucked really badly, just drop it and move on. I’ve still, uh, got a ways to go, but I put a pretty significant dent in it.
I recommend doing this: these are things that I thought looked interesting enough to put in the queue but never interesting enough to actually watch, and although that meant I got a lot of duds I also got a lot of surprisingly watchable films. It also felt a lot like being a kid and just watching whatever mid-tier film cable TV was serving up that Saturday afternoon: rarely incredible but always good enough to keep watching it.
How it Ends, was stand out of these. It’s small film, about a guy and his father-in-law going from one place to the next while the world is in the process of ending. What that apocalypse is: never said, and that’s perfect… because it’s not about that. I don’t know what I expected from it, but it overdelivered.
The Diplomat
This went into the queue while I was doing that purge and I hit it pretty quickly. I was very frustrated by the season ending… it ends on a cliffhanger and the season doesn’t really have an arc that gets resolved, which is something too many shows do these days and I will not abide it!
But: what’s there is extremely compelling. I can’t think of the last show I was so eager to hurry up and get back to in the way I did The Diplomat.
I’m really looking forward to the next season: I just hope the show fucking goes somewhere with it.