Friday Links: Carcosa, Donnie Darko, and The Time of the Hawklords

As the weekend hurtles toward us, let's take a long look back on the days that led up to it:

• John Kenneth Muir tackled Donnie Darko in a must-read piece: "In seeing his world end, however, Donnie experiences an epiphany.  He comes to finally recognize that 'destruction is a form of creation,' to quote the film.  His ending -- his death -- creates a new beginning for his family, his girlfriend, and the whole of the human race.  He laughs madly immediately preceding his death, because only at the end does he recognize God’s plan for him."
• Sean Eaton took us on a brief, disturbing trip to Carcosa in his invaluable, incredible R'lyeh Tribune: "Interestingly, The King in Yellow is not a history book or a procedural manual like its brothers on the shelf.  It is a dramatic work, a play. Its creator Robert W. Chambers beguiles his readers with snatches of dialogue and song, but never provides enough of the material to cause insanity or suicide in the reader—only curiosity.  His marvelous fictional work of the same name, published in 1895, is a collection of stories linked thematically around the effects of reading The King in Yellow."
  
• The pressbook for Nightmare was one of the many interesting things to come out of Zombos' Closet.
• Nev Murray reviewed Caroline Mitchell's Don't Turn Around at his Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "The addition of the paranormal element is a fantastic twist that keeps you glued to the story because you never really know what’s going to happen next. Jennifer doesn’t so why should you? You know the way you can guess things when the main character is still in the dark and you might scream at them to see what you see? Not with this baby you won’t. I knew who the ultimate villain in the story was from very early on. No I didn’t. I thought I did then when it became clear it wasn’t them, I finally had it sussed."  (No word on whether Der Kommissar's in town or not.)
• The Time of the Hawklords was a featured dish at Breakfast in the Ruins: "Given that Michael Moorcock knocked about with Hawkwind quite a bit on the Ladbroke Grove freak-scene of the early ‘70s (contributing spoken word recitations and slightly more nebulous ‘concepts’ to their ‘Space Ritual’ and ‘Warrior At The Edge of Time’ albums, amongst other things), it must have seemed splendidly inevitable that the prolific scribe should choose to immortalise his rock n’ roll mates in fiction at some point. However, the co-billing here of Michael Butterworth (a latter-day New Worlds contributor who went on to co-found the controversial Manchester imprint Savoy Books), together with the book’s absence from most Moorcock bibliographies, tells a slightly different story."
• At Ginger Nuts of Horror, Alex Davis watched Guinea Pig: The Devil's Experiment so you don't have to: "It was particularly made infamous when, in 1991, the second movie in the series, Flower of Flesh and Blood, was investigated by the FBI as potentially being a genuine snuff film. The sixth film in the series, Devil Woman Doctor, was also found in the collection of serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, which only added to the movies' dark reputation."
• Here, I reviewed the zombie apocalypse film Wyrmwood and pointed you to a trio of brand-new reviews of The Blessed Man and the Witch.

Illustration by Tom Sullivan, taken from Call of Cthulhu's Masks of Nyarlathotep supplement.