Tag Archives: Wasteland

Wastelands: The People of Sand and Slag

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I grew up on sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. As a kid, I immersed myself into Lovecraft and 70s-80s slasher films. What I was really after were the concepts. I craved ideas with hideous worldbuilding undertones. Growing up, I never found media to be terrifying because I could rationalize that it’s all performance art.

I’ve only ever found two stories that filled me with a squeamish dread. The first is my favorite horror movie, Idiocracy. The second is The People of Sand and Slag. It is a truly gruesome and disgusting tale that digs at my skin with its razor blade fingers. The blood curdling anxiety is felt long after the book is closed. Continue reading →

Wastelands: Salvage

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As stated on Twitter, I recently picked up Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse an anthology of post-apocalyptic shorts. The series includes many notable authors, some of whom were recommended to me. With this series, I want to look at each story to get a better grasp on the plot, characters, and the apocalypse itself. This promises to be one of the few times The Rad-lands will be breaking away from specifically post-nuclear fiction.

MV5BODU4ZTczOGUtOWMyZC00MDQzLTkzOWItMWQ2NmM0YzZjMDEwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNDUzOTQ5MjY@._V1_UY317_CR34,0,214,317_AL_“Salvage” is one of those stories that just makes me roll my lips and go “brrrrrtttt” until I run out of air. I had to read this story twice because the first run just didn’t stick with me. It’s purely subjective, but something about the prose or the way characters talk gave my internal narrator an uncomfortable southern drawl that made the words feel slow and sticky, similar to Willem Dafoe’s performance as Rat in Fantastic Mr. Fox. While hunting down illustrations for this piece, I noticed that discussion on this story is pretty scant. Frankly, I wasn’t surprised to find “Salvage” has a 2.5/5 average on Goodreads. That having been said, if you can get past the thick dialect and the lack of context for the surrounding world, I think you’ll find something worth salvaging from the murky depths of The Mormon Sea. Continue reading →

Cult Classics: Wheels of Fire

Following the success of Mad Max 2 was a handful of post-apocalyptic B-movies. Among those was Wheels of Fire (also known as Pyro, Vindicator, and Desert Warrior), a surprisingly decent take on the post-apocalyptic genre which takes a lot of inspiration from the perfectly hammy Warriors of the Wasteland. Despite some mediocre cinematography and acting, Wheels of Fire proved to be a fast paced, action packed, and overall interesting movie. If you follow our cult classics section regularly, you know how this works by now, we’re going to break the movie into four parts.

  1. The plot
  2. Interesting concepts
  3. Cinematography
  4. The ending

The Plot: First of all, this story is massive. Warriors of the Wasteland was just as long, but most of the movie was overextended fight scenes. Wheels of Fire always has something new happening. The scale is massive and so is the synopsis.

Wheels of Fire Arlie

Our story begins with typical not-Mad-Max archetype, Trace, entering a merchant village. Here we’re introduced to his younger sister, Arlie, and her annoying, controlling boyfriend. In the first five minutes, Arlie’s boyfriend fights in a gladiatorial arena where contestants wear car keys around their necks and beat each other with PVC pipes. Don’t think about it too much. It doesn’t matter. Continue reading →