Fall novels are what you cuddle up with, grab a hot cup of instant-powder-mix cocoa, and glue your eyes to the words that jump off of the page of the novel written with you in mind. Those same novels that—Norman Mailer writes—many authors pour themselves into until they’ve run out of what makes them who they are. Ultimately, they succumb to this process, draining their bank accounts, burning their social security card, and moving to Alaska.
Count Dracula. Van Helsing. Nicholas Cage. This novel birthed gems like Nosferatu and…the vampire romance genre…
Nicholas Cage based his entire persona on Nosferatu for the lead role in Vampire’s Kiss. While the story doesn’t have the same oomph that it did when it first arrived, it has great suspense in the form of that diary-entry-style of the heyday.
Stakes, garlic, cross necklaces, antichrist bloodlust, the night—it’s a party. Dracula is such a hallmark of Autumn that it’s hard to get by without noticing him on windows.
This book was turned into a movie that stars Daniel Radcliffe (who’s doing an awesome job in preventing being Harry-Potter typecasted). We have a love-story, crime novel that involves supernatural elements. This story probably falls under magical realism.
Books generally give us different types of stories than movies. Just like an interactive video game, we understand the nooks and crannies because we get to see the more intricate parts of the story.
This one falls under weird fiction. It’s about an alien who telepathically accesses a child’s senses of the world, instantly planting knowledge into the child’s mind (and being able to see through their eyes). News reporters wonder if it’s an angel.
This is a short book, and it is really based on concept alone. Not the most riveting of the Fall novels, but certainly a thinker.
Frankenstein was written by Mary Shelley, and it is platinum among silver. She is arguably one of the greatest novelists that’s ever lived. This is one of the first sci-fi horror pieces written. After alchemy, but before Marie Curie discovered radiation the hard way, chemistry itself was in its infancy. This was the time for imagination to reign supreme.
Frankenstein’s Adam is a very misunderstood creature who would just like some company without people vomiting at the sight of him. He learned a language on his own (he deserves more credit). The first friend he had was a blind man. This is relatable to most of us, in that, we just want some friends who won’t defecate upon viewing our sewn-together body.
This Philip K. Dick novel was adapted into the rotoscoped, beauty of a movie by the same name. Do you like dystopian novels about fictional drugs: something called Substance Death, cut with meth? Great.
This story isn’t the first to come to mind when thinking of Dick’s legacy. It’s semi-autobiographical. If you’ve ever suffered from depersonalization and/or derealization, the book and movie give some indication to what’s going on, except that the protagonist seems to be suffering from a type of Prosopagnosia.
Imagine waking up one day, either after trauma, drug usage, or both, and find that when you walk and talk, it doesn’t feel real. When you look at a reflection or picture of yourself, it feels foreign. You feel a sense of existential dread. Now add in a dystopian society.
Everyone loves an adventure. It takes them out of the mundane trivialities that populate their day to day existence. This is a shorter read than some novels, and it’s a beloved tale that most are familiar with. Many people have seen both the cartoon and the awful live-action movies (which are an abomination and should be killed with fire). Give the books a chance if you were scarred by how horrible the movies were.
More existential dread. This book was based on the real-life firebombing of Dresden. Much like the mass rape of German women by allied forces and comfort women, this is a less-than-well-known event from WWII (on our spotless record as a country). Also known as The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, this is another book about losing one’s sense of who they are and their relation to the world around them.
Disjunct timelines create a Memento-esque feel. There are aliens. Who doesn’t love aliens⸮ This book is ultimately a sci-fi novel, but it could be interpreted as a fantasy, fairly easily. Without going into the plot—either because you’ve already read it or because you intend on reading it—this is a very well-written story that serves as a foyer to a mind palace of trauma.
What would happen if North Korea, the former Soviet Union, and China were the only three countries that spanned the continents⸮ There are totalitarian governments, propaganda, newspeak, three super-large sovereignties, perpetual wars that require a constant state of authoritarian emergency power, the Great Firewall, etc.
The story centers on a character who lives in a dystopia, trying to find a way past the system. Most people with the ability to rationalize feel that Kellyanne Conway’s usage of alternative facts is scarily objectively close to the propaganda of the novel.
This caused a massive spike in the sales of the book due to the flagrant Orwellian spinning of “plain-old facts.” Conwaying has become its own verb. This novel seems to be relevant at all times because power will always be a type of Hobbesian give and take.
It’s hard not to get the novel’s contents mixed up with the movie’s contents. The movie might be better than the novel, but the novel is still an amazing feat. An anarchist’s dive into madness. Like The Matrix and Buster’s Mal Heart, this is a story about the “system.”
An escape from the system is like a Marxian release from the shackles of alienated labor. Debt. Mediocrity. The desire to be born again through destruction. The desire to destroy imaginary wealth created by non-labor through debt and capital.
The desire to make your own back-yard sovereignty. Make sure to purchase the book, movie, and comics, just like your copy of The Communist Manifesto.
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