Autumn Lives Here
Vol. 101: A tasty Fall crisp, insane Lifetime movies, and reminding Mom how lucky she is to have us.
Let me wish you a Happy Mother’s Day! Whether you’re a mom or not, every holiday gives us a chance to add some extra creepiness to our lives, and isn’t that what we all want? Especially because we’ll soon be saying goodbye to Spring and “dammit, you’re back?” to Summer. Yes, that festering boil on the backside of the year comes around too soon and hangs on too long, like a drunk who refuses to go home and gets a good grip on the door jamb. We’ve all seen it.
This is when I’m reminded of the Queen Mother’s advice to close my eyes and think of jack o’ lanterns. She said something like that, and I’m sure she was talking about how dreadful Summer is. You should hide from it at ALH, where it’s always dark, the wind scatters the leaves, and Halloween is just a week away.
Netflix is releasing Bodkin on May 9th. Starring Will Forte, this Irish comedy horror series is about a true crime podcasting team investigating a missing persons case. Watch the trailer.
Gingersnap Apple Crisp- from Yankee Magazine
‘Round here, we celebrate Autumn all year round here, so even in Summer (pah-tooie!) we’re having a big mouthful of Fall.
9 large apples, peeled, cored and cut into ½ inch slices
20 gingersnaps
½ c firmly packed brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp salt
10 tbs cold salted butter, cut into small pieces
¾ c rolled oats
½ c pecans or walnuts
Set an oven rack to the middle position and preheat the oven to 375F. Arrange the apple slices evenly in a 13x9 inch baking dish.
*Food processor instructions: pulse the cookies, sugar, cinnamon and salt until sandy.
Add the butter, oats and nuts and pulse until the nuts are the size of small peas and the mixture looks like wet sand.
*Hand instructions: Put the cookies in a gallon size Ziploc and crush to a fine powder with a rolling pin. Pour into a mixing bowl and add the sugar, cinnamon and salt, stirring well until it resembles sand.
Chop the nuts finely. Add to the cookie mixture, along with the butter and oats, and use a pastry cutter or two butter knives to cut in the butter until mixed and resembling wet sand.
*Either method: spread the mixture over the apples and bake 50-60 minutes, until golden and bubbling. Cool and serve with vanilla ice cream.
SPOOKY BOOKY
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
Tor Nightfire, 2022
This retelling of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher ratchets up the tension in the crumbling manor shared by siblings. In Kingfisher’s version, soldier Alex Easton is called in by her friend Roderick, who fears his sister Madeline is in a swift decline. While there’s nothing Alex can do for Madeline, and there is already a doctor attending to her, Roderick wants Alex as a friend and witness, as he too is in a fragile state.
Confused and searching for the cause of her friend’s ill health, Alex wanders the isolated land and can’t help but notice the bizarre behavior of the wild hares, their strange movements, their fearlessness.
Here you have an atmosphere thick with foreboding. If you’re looking for “nature horror” this is a must. Scare Scale: 2.5
Scary Viewing: Lifetime’s Boy in the Walls
Here we are, nearly two years deep into Autumn Lives Here, and I have yet to ever talk about a Lifetime movie. This network is a goldmine of non-stop lying, cheating, back-stabbing and murder, where women are gaslit by their husbands. Or best friends. Or the neighbors. In a nutshell, if you want to see some crazy shit happening in Canada to ladies with Pilates bodies and perfect hair, look to Lifetime. It’s like Hallmark Mysteries, but with adultery and revealing clothing.
I’ve chosen the 2023 Lifetime movie Boy in the Walls because it’s based on the true crime case of The Andrews Haunting, which I covered in my very first post back in June, 2022, but you might have seen my repost in Vol. 77. This was a terrifying instance of phrogging, where someone secretly lives within the walls of someone else’s home. It’s happened, but the Andrews incident went beyond any other I know of, and no doubt that’s why it caught the gunky eyes of the Lifetime writers like a shiny penny.
Let’s go. Alisa (Ryan Michelle Bathe) is newly married to a widower with two children. While Alisa dreams of being a happy family in their 100 year-old home, her young stepson is wary of her and her teen stepdaughter is an outright bitch who is sold in a two-pack with a smirking boyfriend whose face is so punchable that I hoped Alisa would eventually display some MMA training.
The viewer is certainly led to believe this a-hole boyfriend will be the adversary. But it might be Chris, Alisa’s new husband who is always away for work and when he’s home he’s giving Alisa the “it’s a creaky old house” treatment in response to her reports of the weird things going on. You should know that every Lifetime movie has someone telling the lead that it’s all in her head. The vandalized porcelain doll, the stereo playing when no one’s home, the fillet of rat left on the stepdaughter’s bed, Chris knows there’s a logical explanation.
It isn’t until her stepdaughter agrees with Alisa that something weird is happening in their house that Alisa gets all Miss Marple, exploring closets and pushing on panels that shouldn’t be pushed unless you’re armed with more than a flashlight. Cheese and crackers, it’s like she’s never heard the My Favorite Murder podcast slogan: “Stay sexy and don’t get murdered, Alisa.”
Yet she does get to the bottom of it all after being tied up by a greasy teenager who’s been living in the walls with eye holes drilled everywhere so he can watch the family. Not only that, this Bad Ronald wanna-be, played very effectively by Jonathan Whitesell, has dug Alisa’s urine-soaked pregnancy test out of the trash and is very upset to find that she’s pregnant. Too upset to wear gloves, he’s just holding that pee stick with bare hands.
He pants out an explanation: it was he who left the eviscerated rat, as assurance that he’s learned how to do abortions! Because what Alisa, or any woman wants, is to have a hyperventilating kid jimmying around in there with a butter knife, seeing if he can knock something loose.
After taking you this far into the movie, I’d feel bad if I didn’t just tell you everything, like that Alisa and the stepdaughter band together to fight this loon and run out of the house as the police pull up, and after being threatened with an Abortion for Dummies student, who also beat the stepdaughter, Alisa asks an arresting officer to be kind to the boy. “Being locked up? What good does that do?” she asks, to which I feel just awful in listing the good it would do:
1. He wouldn’t be able to come back and pull your baby out with rusty pliers.
2. He wouldn’t be able to throw the stepdaughter down the stairs. Or watch her in her bedroom, the perv. Or leave a dead rat on her bed. Or destroy her late mother’s stuff.
3. Alisa’s husband wouldn’t look at her like he’s mentally fitting her into a straitjacket.
I say all that because the real boy this story is based on was let out of jail after terrorizing the Andrew family. It was a very bad decision.
Great. Now we’ll all be knocking on the walls and hoping nobody knocks back.
I’m in the market for more creepy readers! People who hide from the sun and believe Saturdays are ‘laundry and scary movie’ days. People who shape meatloaf like human body parts and laugh, who like ghost stories and Halloween events and cocktails. Or just a dark sense of humor qualifies, my standards are low. Go ahead and use your dirty, snaggle-nailed fingers to subscribe.
Next week: For my Glorious Goriest subscribers (which you should be), a roundup of creepy podcasts and a lousy day at Hanging Rock. Now go call your mother and tell her you’re bringing over meatloaf.
We've been making apple crisp as a fast after-school snack lately. So so good, even if there is blaring sunshine outside.
Apple crisp looks fantastic, I'll give it a try.