And He Who Walks Behind the Rows did say, “I will send Outlanders amongst you…and these Outlanders will be unbelievers and profaners of the holy.”
–Isaac (John Franklin), Children of the Corn
All right, go ahead and sacrifice me to your respective vegetable-god. I like Children of the Corn.
When I was seven years old, I was in love with, and terrified by, a movie called Dolls Its director, Stuart Gordon, was famous for his film adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories–including the cult classic The Re-Animator, which would’ve made Lovecraft himself projectile-vomit–and would later switch gears entirely with Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. In Dolls, these career paths converge: it’s as magical as Peter Pan and as violent as Friday the 13th.
What does some movie about angry dolls have to do with Nancy Russell Burger’s book about raising an NLD child? Dolls isn’t a terrible film, but it doesn’t fit its own format very well–it’s too childish for grownups, and too gory for kids. And A Special Kind of Brain isn’t a bad book by any means. But it’s neither the “how to parent an NLDer” book it claims to be, nor the memoir it probably should’ve been.
“Hey, do y’all have the new Super Smash Bros.?”
I can’t believe I’m asking this question. Fighting games aren’t exactly my favorite videogame genre. Sure, I fiddle with them sometimes—at 12, I rented Mortal Kombat II at the video store because “Hey! It’s the game Congress hates!”—but they aren’t much fun to play if you don’t have real people to fight. (All my friends are mature, responsible adults who’d rather go out drinking at the bar than play some videogame). So I wouldn’t pay $50 for a fighting game, and I sure as heck wouldn’t show up excitedly at Target on release date.
I hadn’t.