Crosley Spelman

       For this week's reading, I read Annihilation . I very much became very interested and fascinated by the plot of this story early on because I love the mixture between horror and sci-fi that the author made. After reading this book as well as watching the trailer for the movie, it reminded me a lot of the movie Arrival . I draw this parallel from many observations but the one that I think best represents it is how in both stories, the character's are introduced to sights and places that would have been "unimaginable" or so abstract in their form that they completely shatter their viewers relation and connection to what is real, and what is not. Another way to say that is "we don't know what we don't know, because we don't know it!" Although that is not some elaborate and super deep thing to say at surface level, I believe the core message and power that it creates is the sheer curiosity we as humanity have for the unknown.      The unknown ...

     Throughout the course of reading this story, I kept thinking back to a quote you had mentioned in the week 3 assignment post that read: " The novels and films featured this week often embody a sense of the emptiness of contemporary life, representing a world in which the protagonists are having a great deal of trouble finding their place." I believe a lot can be said about expressing a sense of "emptiness" in A Wild Sheep Chase. My first example of this would be the lifestyle that the narrator existed in before taking off on his journey to find the sheep from the photograph. One thing I personally think about quite often as a digital artist, is the high probability that I could end up working in a similar "urban jungle" where my day to day life is constrained to getting to work in a studio somewhere downtown in a dense concrete infested city, working all day and then going back to whatever concrete box of an apartment I may have and repeating that cyc...

  My initial thoughts after reading An Interview with a Vampire , is how interesting it was to see Louis battle with his inner “moral compass” throughout the book and the few times he went against his ethics out of sheer desperation considering his permanent hell having to stay a vampire and never being able to return to his mortal human self. One parallel I drew between this story and Frankenstein , is comparing the character of Frankenstein to Louis. They both fight an endless “hell” every second of every day, this being the fact that they realize they simply aren’t like the other people around them and have no redeemable courses of action to take to achieve any sense of societal acceptance and or forgiveness. I saw this when in the beginning, Louis greatly struggled with the act of killing other humans for blood that he so desperately needed in order to survive or feel any sense of peace. I could tell he grappled with this dilemma greatly, and when he finally gave into his tempt...

 Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, was a very enjoyable read, but what was even more eye-opening about it I did not learn until after I had finished the book and chose to do my own research about the time period and how this story has withstood the test of time among other tales within its genre. These key differences I will go into shortly. At a mere surface level, gothic literature has several very notable themes. These being “gloomy and ominous” architecture and scenes. Within these sets usually contains some sort of “supernatural” monster or in Frankenstein’s case, a “creation.” Sometimes these threats are visible and described in immense detail to the reader. But other times, we don’t even need to see or know exactly the grueling details of the monster to understand the sheer horror it possesses to the main character/characters. In Frankenstein, this theme of “horror” is displayed through the sheer unpredictable actions that Frankenstein takes throughout the novel. These ac...