I'm not saying genres are rigid, I'm saying that Afghanistam is wrong to think that JS&MN is supposed to be "stuff that could have happened in our own history that we just didn't know about." "Secret history" is a common term for that kind of story. That's just not what is going on here— by the end (spoilers) things…

"Secret history" is the subgenre you're thinking of, and it can be fun (Tim Powers is one writer who gets a lot of mileage out of it), but JS&MN isn't one of those. There's no "cover-up", everyone in the story is aware of more or less what went on during England's magical period and there's no reason to think it would…

Funny, it never occurred to me that Norrell meant the resurrection remark as reverse psychology. He seems pretty oblivious to how other people will respond to anything, and to whether they understand what he's talking about, so I figured that when they said "Lady Pole died, it's a tragedy", he just assumed that they…

That's just about exactly how they come across in the early parts of the book, though you get a bit more detail about Norrell that makes him even more unlikable (for instance it's clearer that he's been deliberately buying up all the occult books in England not just for his own research, but to screw over all the…

I saw it on BBC America too, and saw everything that was mentioned in the review. It does go by pretty fast, though— I think that's partly just a style thing, since British shows often feel abruptly edited to me, and also a consequence of the book being very eventful (but not seeming so busy on the page, because of…

In the movie and the novel, the Italian cop Pazzi had investigated the real-life Il Mostro case in the '70s and '80s. Hannibal tries to give him some hints, which might either be just because Hannibal is a perceptive fan of serial killers, or a suggestion that the killer was really him (though the Il Mostro murders…

Gideon is a guy who wanted to be a super-monster (rather than just a reasonably well educated asshole who killed his family) so badly that Chilton managed to convince him he was the Chesapeake Ripper, so I'd say "self-delusional defiance" fits with that pretty well. It also makes sense that he doesn't really have a…

Well, that part is straight out of the book (although, IIRC, in the book he wasn't assuming the identity of a real guy but had made up the name as one of his little jokes).

Yeah, Graham in the book is a fairly different character. He's still got the hypersensitive morbid imagination (and a vindictive streak), but it's buried further down and you can believe that he comes across as more of a regular guy to most people. Graham on the show is like if he had all of his regular-guyness sanded…

Yeah, I can't really be annoyed by that line from the HitFix review; Sepinwall made it clear what he meant. There's no reason that everyone with good taste must make themselves watch everything. I know plenty of people who just don't have a high tolerance for gore, and if I insisted "Dammit, no, eat your vegetables!…

I keep meaning to look for his really early thrillers that he wrote as "John Lange" and see if they hold up at all - I remember liking "Binary" a lot (FBI procedural - mad genius steals nerve gas - straightforwardly written, fast-moving, & proof that Crichton always liked a good gruesome death scene).

To be fair, most people under age 50 have probably only seen pictures of Manson from either right around the time of the murders, when he was trying to look scary, or after he'd been in jail for decades and had kind of let himself go (and carved shit on his head). Whereas people know Ted Bundy was handsome because all…

Spoiler: everyone who was ever murdered on the show is actually still alive! Hannibal sent them all away to play on a farm.

I don't normally go for Hollywood rumor-mongering, but I do enjoy the story that Pitt enraged John Cameron Mitchell by eating lots of garlic and onions before their kissing scenes in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

It might be a bespoke windbreaker. And/or made out of people.

Whoa, Chilton has metafictional psychic powers so he can see Twitter pictures from the creator of the show he's on, and then write books about them? I can't say I saw that coming.

Depending on what you mean by "modern", and whether it's "most adaptations per book" or "most unrelated adaptations of various books in the series", Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books might hold that record. But it's close.

Much as I'd like to see Swinton in everything, I'm not sure I'm with you on that one. Besides being almost the exact opposite of the character's physical description (something I don't normally worry too much about, though if they cast everyone in this particular book as a slender white person, it'll be irritating),…

Ah, whoops, I get it now. Well, I've never worked for something the size of Hooli, but having been an engineer in various kinds of supposedly important projects I would say oh my God yes this is fairly plausible. It doesn't even need to mean Gavin isn't paying attention (though that's certainly possible - there really…

Jared is actually a 200-year-old Kaspar Hauser, who wanders the earth in an ageless amnesic state like Wolverine.