Paul Ruditis

This book features a lot of great pictures of all incarnations of the Frankenstein monster, but after a good start, it sort of rattles on and on and is a bit repetitive toward the end, making the same point over and over. It could do with a bit better organization as well. The author's analysis, thank goodness, doesn't get into deep, dark psychobabble--but it doesn't offer a lot of new insight either. It is certainly interesting, however, to see all the permutations the story has had over show more the years, and this brought me up to date with some of the ones I had missed since I stopped watching a lot of monster movies and reading comic books. show less

[review written 2011]

I just finished reading Drama!: Show Don’t Tell by Paul Rudtis. Like Broadway Lights it’s a book that I have tried yet failed to read before. Well, it wasn’t as bad as it seemed to be on my first try, but it wasn’t as good as it could be. The characters were funny, yes, but cliched. Marq annoyed me at times. His flamboyance is even more than Kurt Hummel on Glee, and Kurt is gay. The Renaissance Faire plot irritated me slightly as well, but this may be show more intentional, since the narrator, Bryan didn’t like either.

That was one of the good points of the book. Bryan was an easily likable character and his narration was funny. I even laughed out loud a couple times, which gets awkward once you’re in a silent classroom. All in all, it was an average book, not particularly mentionable, but not deserving a skip-over. show less

This is an interesting continuation story, where Prue is back to life. Problem is, she's trapped as a facilitator of a spiritual nexus called The All. And Cole is back too. Mainly to help her and to be able to redeem his soul.

Of course Phoebe is trying to avoid Cole, and Prue for that matter. And Piper is overcompensating by mediating between them. Paige is actually doing more of everything, and seems more like the middle sister in that she tells Phoebe to stop avoiding Prue, and Piper to show more stop avoiding her family and restaurant in trying to help Prue adjust.

I really would have loved to have read more about Prue's return and her giving up her place in The Power of Three for Paige. That could have been a story all on it's own. show less

I had very mixed feelings about The Walking Dead TV series at the beginning. I really liked the survival-horror soap opera premise, and I was impressed with the production values, especially the great FX work on the zombie makeup. I also found both the zombies and the post-apocalyptic world they'd created genuinely scary. But my reaction to the characters ranged from mild liking to a strong and frequent desire to punch them in the face, and I thought several aspects of the storytelling could show more have been handled better than they were. The show's gotten steadily better as it's gone on, though, and I'm now very glad I decided to stick with it. Somewhere in season two, something finally clicked for me, and at this point, I'm completely hooked on it, and have developed considerable emotional investment in at least some of the characters. (OK, mostly Daryl. But he'd be almost enough by himself to make the show worth watching.)

With the series about to return after its mid-season three hiatus, and with me feeling much more charitable towards those early episodes in hindsight, this seemed like a good time to take a little look back with this companion volume, which was published between the first and second seasons. It covers pretty much the territory you'd expect:the development of the show, its comic-book origins, casting and visual effects, and so on. It's decently written, as such things go, with plenty of interesting quotes from various people involved in the making of the series, especially showrunner Frank Darabont and Robert Kirkman, who wrote (and still writes) the original comic. My only real complaint about it, except for some oddly repetitive material in the first couple of chapters, is that it's full of "sidebars" -- often several pages long -- that interrupt the main text, thus necessitating a lot of annoying flipping back and forth. Otherwise, while I wouldn't call it essential reading for fans of the show, it is a generally pleasant little supplement to it. For some definition of the word "pleasant" that includes lots of pictures of flesh-eating corpses, anyway. show less