Jem wasn’t sure how long he’d been gazing into his scotch glass, but he came back to reality at the sound of Raymond’s cough.

According to Jem’s educated guess, Raymond was at least twice his age, but tonight the man looked even older. The aged fellow’s vast torso heaved under a shirt and dinner jacket, his bloated face gleaming red over a bowtie. Occasionally, Raymond ran an arthritis-knotted hand through the sparse gray strands floating on his skull; his reach extended just as often toward the dwindling bottle of whiskey, which he’d kept within close proximity for the majority of the evening.

Jem’s living room was a space of uncertainty: diamond orbs without visible purpose collected dust on the coffee table, a rare Edvard Munch awkwardly shared wall space with discount wall art. Raymond glanced listlessly at one particularly horrid sea turtle print, coughed his bookish cough and swilled scotch…

So what is Dustin LaValley’s A Soundless Dawn all about? Well, for one thing, it’s about pain. Yes, there’s plenty of pain in this book… a lot of it is emotional pain, the kind that comes with bad memories, those past moments that afflict your mind with noisy insistence at ungodly hours. There are bad party vibes and eerie urban visitations and suicides and giant, lurching creatures made of rainwater. There are other kinds of pain in A Soundless Dawn, too — plenty of physical, psychological and metaphysical pain, and more often than not it’s attached to the book’s clearest thematic underpinning: Death.

“Death isn’t simple,” LaValley’s narrators and transient characters repeatedly inform readers. And one suspects that LaValley knowingly conveys this sentiment through his formal decisions; by all means, this is an unusually constructed book. The statement that “death isn’t simple” comes first from “the dirty man” who…

For their third horror crosstalk, Mike Thorn and A.M. (Anya) Novak discuss William Friedkin’s 1973 classic The Exorcist and its controversial sequels/prequels. Over 40 years after the initial release, the original film still enjoys widespread acclaim and constant reference, while the other installments remain divisive. Novak and Thorn compare thoughts and opinions, while also considering The Exorcist’s deeper meanings and implications.

Mike: I was only 12 or 13 when I first saw The Exorcist on TV, which almost definitely helps explain why I found it so terrifying. But I often wonder how much my upbringing might also factor into my strong response to this film; as someone who was raised in a Catholic household, am I more sensitive to the subject matter? While I identify as an agnostic at this point in my life, I feel like having that religious presence in my childhood probably affects my reaction in a big way. I think this comes through…

Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963) revolves around the fissures and overlaps between several artistic forms: Homer’s The Odyssey and its fictional filmic adaptation, Alberto Moravia’s 1954 source novel, and finally Contempt itself, incorporating all of the above. Rather than making gestures to enforce the suspension of disbelief, Godard’s film foregrounds its role in this complicated dialectical network; specifically, it announces itself immediately and loudly as an object of cinema. The film’s opening minutes feature a voice-over narrator reading the cast and crew credits, and a shot of a tracking shot of Francesca (Giorgia Moll). This opening resists the pact of fictional film, which strives for the importance of “building false reality.” Contempt declares itself outright as a combination of dialectical strategies wherein cinema is the central method (or, quite literally, the lens). The opening sequence concludes with a reading of André Bazin’s quote, “Cinema shows us a world…