Ariadne's Thread

  'They know that they are monsters, but I believe they do not really understand what that means to humans.' Lucy Nield reviews 1997 novel Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis.                  @lucy_nield1 Shockingly I have not come across Bakis before, and I am certainly glad that fellow PhD student (David Tierney) leant me his twentieth-anniversary edition for me to read. This edition also includes an extremely valid and thought-provoking introduction from Jeff Vandermeer, which makes you confront thoughts and themes present throughout the text. A Preface introduces us to Cleo, who is going to tell us the tale of the monster dogs. Cleo informs the reader that it has been 6 years since the events of the novel took place, when was 21 the dogs arrived. Suffering from heartbreak she was walking in New York on the West Side when the helicopter landed and the first dog had arrived. What she saw stood on hind legs, wore clothes an...

Netflix’s 'Love and Monsters,' a Review: ‘You don’t have to settle, even at the end of the world.’ Lucy Nield @lucy_nield1 Netflix’s Love and Monsters (2020), promises the viewer a post-apocalyptic adventure, with lashings of romance, community spirit and heroic determination to survive. A comet called Agatha 6-1-6 was heading towards Earth, threatening to kill every living thing on the planet. So in true and predictable human fashion, those in power responded to this threat by launching rockets, nuclear weapons and missiles to prevent the pending collision. Unfortunately, they failed to consider the aftermath of blowing up Agatha, which included a ‘Monsterpocalypse.’   The chemical compounds and radiation form the weapons used to obliterate the comet, rained down over the world, infecting insects a various nonhuman animals, causing mutations and exponential growth in size. The mutated creatures displace humans at the top of the food chain, devouring cities and and ruining ...