Kermet Key > Recent Status Updates

The philosophy of pessimism permeating throughout the book as the foundation - the "why" - of horror makes getting to the end, even on Audible, a chore. In my last chapter I found myself parsing up the sections in an attempt to finish and at this point, that's my only motivation to continue the suffering of this book.

"Who Goes There" is a slightly more entertaining chapter as it uses two of my favorite films THE THING and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS as examples of illusion of self and ego. For in reality, what is the underlying fear of each of those films - the "universal fantasy" that both play out other than the fear of losing our identity and thus our reason for existence, whatever we might assume that is.

Chapter 21 attempts to bookend the discussion and premise that Jerry Falwell's vision for Liberty University was nothing more than a vein attempt to create a Kingdom, Power, and Glory for his family. However, as many of the Christians he interviewed became aware of the cracks in their idols, Alberta, a practicing evangelical Christian, never addresses what drove them to Trumpism in the last decade - social media.

The David Moody piece is why I picked this book up. I remember getting hooked on his self-published zombie series Autumn and that memory played a key role in inspiring me to self-publish my first 2 novels The End as We Know It and What Happened in Storyville.

The chapters beginning with adolescence finally break the readers sense that we're all just automatons driven by our neurons and synapses that were forged before birth or from our environment and how we begin shape our brains with risk assessment until we ultimately settle into our lifelong cognitive thinking.

At least that's what I got out of them.

Chapters 19 and 20 dive headfirst into the SBC sex abuse controversy which was completely unexpected until the reader reflects on the previous chapters and how it relates to the need to maintain power (and glory?) at all costs.

This has been a slog and I'm not sure when I'm going to pick it back up.

Very influential on my ideas about free will and predestination