Staining The Timbre

My first experience with Jonathan Raab's work was The Hillbilly Moonshine Massacre , a pulpy tromp through the high strange that I reviewed two years ago. I reread it before starting this review and I can confidently say I was too harsh. Maybe the near-collapse of democracy and endless emotional assault of recent times has changed my mind, maybe my tastes have just changed, but either way I can say with confidence that Raab is a true artisan of the High Strange, horror or otherwise. The Secret Goatman Spookshow is a new collection of Raab's short stories and flash fiction, some previously published but most freshly released into the world. The wonderfully over the top cover art sets a high bar for the stories and they reach it with aplomb. The opening tale, "Huntin' Them Hills with Joel and Big Howie" is one of the most bone-chilling things I have read in a long, long time. It also sets the tone for the rest of the collection; it's a weird, unyielding story c...

Let's get this out of the way right up front: It is both appropriate and inappropriate to say The Outer Worlds , the first-person scifi RPG developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Private Division, is Fallout in space. The core mechanics are largely similar, the dialogue system is very reminiscent of the Fallout series (save for Fallout 4 and the lifeless, emaciated husk that is Fallout 76 ), and the unique weaponry all smack of what we know and love as Fallout . HOWEVER, I think what many people don't realize is that those traits aren't unique to Fallout , they're unique to a designer who helped create Fallout. Leonard Boyarsky, as far as the average gamer goes, doesn't get the celebrity he deserves. He made his mark at Interplay (eons ago in the ancient 1990s) as Art Director of the first Fallout game, pulling double duty as well polishing dialogue, and cemented that notoriety with his broad stroke involvement in nearly every aspect of Fallout ...

This article is part of a review series covering XXL Magazine's Freshman Class of 2019. For reviewing purposes any content covered is exclusive to the artist's most recent or highest acclaimed work, with the latter taking precedence.

This article is part of a review series covering XXL Magazine's Freshman Class of 2019. For reviewing purposes any content covered is exclusive to the artist's most recent or highest acclaimed work, with the latter taking precedence.

This article is part of a review series covering XXL Magazine's Freshman Class of 2019. For reviewing purposes any content covered is exclusive to the artist's most recent or highest acclaimed work, with the latter taking precedence.

It's little secret that I'm a fan of the high strange; weird tales of grim fantasy and supernatural supposition meant to scratch the parts of our minds that beg for answers to the unknown. Those that ring true give vigor to the falsities and, at its core, conspiracies as people most frequently intend amount to little more than world building exercises. You start with an established, objective fact and spin wildly from there. In this effort The Hillbilly Moonshine Massacre succeeds, eventually. The story's thrust follows Abraham Richards, a war veteran recently returned to Cattaraugus County, a backwater conglomeration of acreage that resembles a town as much as any other 500 population fly-over. Plagued by wartime traumas, and perhaps hoping a job might give him some much needed direction, Abe falls under the employ of Sheriff Cecil Kotto as the County's newest deputy. As any good pulp story asserts, the main character (Abraham Richards, in this case) will alway...

To describe Chambers from only its trailer you'd say it was a young adult horror show with good scares but a middling story. Don't misunderstand me, you'd say, the story isn't bad, it's just nothing new. The issue, you'd insist, was the acting, or maybe the camerawork, or maybe you just didn't like the characters. The main character is a teenage girl, after all, and only half of us can really say we relate, right? You'd be...mostly right. There are problems with Chambers , let me say that up front. They're not egregious sins in the face of God to be repented by begged forgiveness. They are, however, simple things you wouldn't expect from a show of such quality storycraft . Before you can grasp how out of place they feel I think it prudent to explain how well made the show is as a whole. The plot itself is where the careful attention paid shines most brightly. After guiding us through the night main character Sasha's heart stops and...

Poetry has never been my forte. I prefer prose only in that I don't have to try as hard, and as such I have a special respect for proper poets; those who can string a verse with poignancy and grace without fracturing the flow of the piece. These authors are in touch with themselves and their emotions more closely than I could ever hope to be, and that only comes from a place of brutal honesty with oneself. Coincidentally, that's exactly how I would describe Bedroom Music : brutally honest. You don't get that feeling when you first crack its pages, because the overture ("How to Give a Purple Otter Pop") is a brightly-light painting of youth tinged with Castor's characteristic physicality. It's a beautifully candid way to start the collection and serves as the foundation for the rest of the first half. The book itself is informally divided into two sections: the first focusing on experimentation ("Hacienda Avenue"), taking the knocks life serve...

The Silo Series , by which it is referred to in totality, is a popular sci-fi book partly because it's a quality work of art, but also because of the mythology surrounding its publication. Originally only the first book (simply titled Wool ) was meant to stand alone. Hugh Howey self-published the story, having previously decided to do so because of the increased artistic freedom, and let it ride. Driven by the  story's popularity he wrote more entries, starting with Wool: Proper Gauge , which expands upon the grim events of Wool and follows a new set of characters met only briefly in the previous foray. In less than two months he had written the next three entries, Casting Off, The Unraveling, and The Stranded respectively, and completed the core story of the Silo series. This isn't even covering the alleged seven-figure publishing rights payday Howey turned down to maintain online publishing rights while the series was sent to print by Simon & Schuster. He ha...

I first encountered farming simulators at the tender age of seven. I was staying the night at a friend's house and he let me play Harvest Moon on his Gameboy. At the time it seemed like a boring concept (even as an adult the idea of simulating farm work sounds objectively lame) but I found myself enjoying the game far more than I expected. After we went to sleep I secretly pulled out the Gameboy and kept playing for hours under the cover of darkness. For a long time Harvest Moon was basically the only option you had if you wanted to virtually farm. Eventually you had cash grab imitators like Farmville pop up with the advent of social networking, but they never scratched the same itch. They had stripped the gameplay to its bones and forced you to wait an arbitrary amount of time just to progress, leaving them as poor facsimiles of a fondly remembered childhood. I was thus blindsided in 2016 when Steam recommended to me Stardew Valley. Harvest Moon hadn't had a publicly-no...

For a long, long time my favorite book was Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. This was in part because it's objectively a hugely influential novel, and also because I made the decision at a very young age. When you're 14 and you want to sound smart in front of your friends, you pick the most "academic" book you've read and double down on it. That's just how it goes. Luckily reading, unlike the rest of my adolescence, wasn't just a phase. Until my mid-20s I would devour pages and pages in a single sitting, enjoying my time but having convinced myself that, no matter how good a book was, it would never be my favorite book because that slot was already spoken for and, as we all know, favorites are permanent. It was last year when my mother, of all people, told me about Children of Time . She was in the midst of listening to it on audiobook and wasn't having a great time, which was unsurprising given that she's not big into highbrow scifi....