C
As Halloween approaches in the peculiar Maine hamlet of Castle Rock, a graphic designer named Scott Carey steps out…
Ryan Vlastelica
rvlastelica
Ryan is an A.V. Club contributor. His writing has also appeared in Reuters, MarketWatch, the WSJ, and other outlets. He writes a lot about finance but would rather be talking about books.
It’s become widely accepted that a movie adapting a novel should use its source as a guide rather than a strict…
C+
It’s lucky for society that Fred Rogers is having a moment in 2018, some 15 years after his death and 50 years after…
A few years ago, I wrote an essay bemoaning the way Hollywood explores the subject of prejudice. Too often, I…
For all the variety in summer blockbusters, the category has a few attributes that seem pretty much mandatory…
One of the biggest criticisms leveled against the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that the films are too similar—that…
C
For his first novel, President Bill Clinton, along with fiction factory James Patterson, has written a trashy,…
B+
Stephen King’s The Outsider is in many ways a throwback novel, a creature feature that seems ripped from his ’80s…
A main character in The Hunger Games is named Peeta. In The Starving Games, an alleged parody of the series, the…
D
The publication of Gone Girl sparked something of an arms race within literary thrillers, a long-dominant genre that…
In the way music fans would describe themselves as Beatles people or Elvis people, for a time film buffs would…
A-
Larry Norman was perhaps the most complex figure in 20th-century American music. He was a mess of contradictions, a…
Brian Garfield’s 1972 book Death Wish was written as a challenge to audiences. The impulse behind its premise is…
B
It seems like a lark at first, as these things always do, when Nick Beron quits his job to follow his fiancée (whom…
B
In 1992, Robert Harris wrote a popular novel of alternative history, Fatherland, a police thriller set a few decades…
When Die Hard was released in 1988, it was a rebuke to the kind of action film Hollywood was churning out to…
D
The Heather of Heather, The Totality is the daughter of Mark and Karen Breakstone, an unhappily married couple…
Not all great horror stories are “about” something, in the sense that their monster (or monster equivalent)…
Shortly after the election, there was a minor debate in literary circles about which classic dystopian novel better…
Heather, The Totality is ruined by its ending. Weiner makes it clear that Bobby is out to harm Heather, whether…