Update on the Purge – November 2014

Wasn’t sure what picture to put up here, so here is the least offensive image that came up when I typed ‘garbage dump’ into google.

Dylan (Thomsen Esquire):As the year’s spookiest month has come to an end, marking just about 10 weeks of working on this silly little thing, we have decided to create what will (hopefully) be our first update.  It’s easy enough to think of the site as just a couple of us reviewing random stuff, but there is an actual theme here with an actual end-goal in sight, and we have made some actual progress. Since the beginning, part of the goal for the blog was to also catalog the results of finally having experienced all these things we have collected over the years by deciding whether we would keep said item or sell/donate/trash it.

Before we get to that, however, I did want to quickly give a tiny bit of insight into how we view our posts thus far. The Purge is all about our opinions and experiences with the items in question. The critiques have been less about what these movies/books/comics are, and more about how we feel about them. They are opinions. Criticism can be super self-righteous statements presented by some Holier Than Thou warrior on a campaign to get you to not like something because they see it as trite or offensive. That is not our aim. We hope that our posts are at least somewhat thought provoking but not at the expense of being fun to read. That would be a bummer.

Anyways! Here are some updates on Das Heap.

Dylan’s Heap:

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Returned

Dancer in the Dark – Donated

Humans Issue #0 – Kept

Eraserhead – Kept

Night of the Living Dead (1990) – Donated

The Mist – Returned

Dan’s Heap:

Weird Fishes – Kept

The Swiss Conspiracy/Moon of the Wolf – Thrown away

Critters Collection – Kept

Night of the Living Dead (1968) – Kept

Uzumaki – Returned

Everything’s Eventual – Kept

Rebirth of Mothra 3 – Reluctantly Kept

Dan (Johnny The Russian Cat) here. Damn. I really thought I had crossed more things off my list than 6 in the past 3 months, but I guess not. That’s good, though, because I’m nowhere near feeling finished with the purge. When Dylan came to me with the idea a few months back, I was very excited for it but had a small sense of dread that it’d peter out after just a couple of posts. It’s still happily rolling along, and my heap has grown almost as much as I’ve taken away from it, leaving me with the same amount of content I had when I started… and I’m okay with that.  It’s going to be exciting to start picking things I actually want to read/watch soon, instead of just grabbing whatever. This Book is Full of Spiders (the sequel to John Dies at the End) is at the top of my most looked forward to list, as well as finishing off Michael Crichton’s The Lost World. On the opposite end, I’m dreading going through all four Tolkien’s Middle Earth books, a lengthy WWIII sci-fi military novel and a book infamous between Dylan and myself; The Unicorn. With that being said, I look forward to powering through the rest of collection, as it’s been  extremely varied so far, and I’m not even halfway done yet. I just hope there’s not as much stupid bullshit in mine as there already has been.

Heapers Creepers: Stephen King’s The Mist

Format: novella

Time in possession: 3 years

I feel like I was born 2 decades too late to really have any deep admiration for Stephen King’s literary works. Having spent my childhood listening to my parents talk about how terrifying The Stand was, and watching so many of his stories take on film adaptations, it was easy to become over saturated with his name. I had spent enough time witnessing his very clearly established ability to create an interesting story as showcased by those that made it into another format. By the point in my life that I came into possession of a brain wholly my own, capable of harboring opinions wholly my own, I was inspired enough to finally read a King novel for myself.

That novel, Thinner, was fine. It wove an unsettling story that fit it’s super relaxed, fast-paced prose well enough to keep my attention for it’s few hundred pages. However, upon finishing it i was stricken with a sense of emptiness. That sense of accomplishment and excitement that usually comes with having completed a book was nowhere to be found, and honestly, I hadn’t really felt much the entire time I was in the thick of it. It was strange.

A few years later, looking at my shelf for the purge, I noticed that I still had the copy of Stephen King’s The Mist that I had borrowed from a friend around the same time i finished Thinner, and decided it was the perfect month to finally give The King of Horror another shot; a decision that has left me with a deep, torn feeling of confusion.