My Favorite Things with Kristin Dearborn

They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Kristin Dearborn, whose most recent release, Sacrifice Island, came out last October!

What does Kristin love when she’s not writing about long-buried secrets demanding their due? Spoiler alert: watching a favorite thing come to life on the big screen, an adorable spy who uses Scrabble tiles to communicate, and a true crime podcast that features serial killers, UFOs, cryptids, hauntings, and conspiracies. Curious? Read on to learn more!

I’m very excited to be writing about my favorite things for Speculative Chic EXCEPT now I can’t get the damned song out of my head. I spent a while chewing on this. Do I look at the year 2019 and pluck my favorite speculative goodies from that? Do I look at the entire decade of the aughts? Do I weave a compelling narrative with a theme of strong female characters and push my feminist agenda?

Or do I just pick…my favorite things?

Let’s start with Jurassic Park. Book, movie, you name it, both are brilliant, and I firmly believe, the property of horror and not science fiction. You may note I didn’t say The Jurassic Park Franchise – that’s a gloomy wasteland with two bright spots (Jurassic Park and Jurassic World). I love dinosaurs, I have since I was a little girl. My mom has a great story about me, maybe age 3, walking down the street with a pink baby carriage. A woman stopped and asked if she could see my babies. Proudly, I showed her. It was this guy and his t-rex pal (I was amazed I could find a picture of the triceratops!). She recoiled, gave my mother a rather judgy look, and hurried along on her way. When Jurassic Park came out in 1993 I was eleven, and I devoured the book. Here were dinosaurs as I’d always wanted to see them . . . real animals. Always before they were in a scientific book: here’s a picture of what a Gallimimus looks like, it was this big compared to humans, they were omnivorous, blah blah blah. But Jurassic Park showed them in action, flocking together, looking like big birds. I saw the special 3-D release of Jurassic Park for its 25th anniversary, and expected the 3-D to be schlocky and to hate it. In the back row of the packed theater, there was a cluster of teenagers. In the beginning, they were calling out, making fun of the movie, and I wanted to murder them. But it got them. By the end they were screaming at the scary parts, and hearing their reactions, obviously seeing the classic for the first time, made the whole experience better. The effort and love put into those special effects puts all of the sequels to shame (and almost killed one of the FX guys). Reading about and seeing dinosaurs behave as close to real life as modern science can tell us, watching them break out of their confinement and, uh, find a way, is why Jurassic Park is one of my favorite things.

Dean Koontz’ Watchers is another of my favorite things. Here we are talking exclusively about the 1987 novel and not the 1988 film adaptation, or any of its sequels. In fact, we’re just going to pretend those don’t exist. Like yin and yang, scientists created two war machines. One, a hideous monster known as the Outsider, build for shock and awe and devastation. The second is a golden retriever with the intelligence of a human. While he doesn’t speak, he does get to spell out messages with Scrabble tiles. His job is to gather enemy intel while looking adorable. The Outsider is insanely jealous of his endearing little brother, because the Outsider is smart enough to be self-aware about how hideous and unlovable he is, particularly when compared to a brilliant version of man’s best friend. The creatures escape, the dog finds some charmingly broken humans, who he brings together and they call him Einstein, and the Outsider, some federal agents, and an assassin chase them through the book. When I was a kid I loved the super smart dog. As an adult, and more widely read I still love the super smart dog, but the Outsider is so much more compelling. Koontz crafted a villain with nuance and depth, and while we fear it because it is out of control and violent, it also gets our empathy. It was created, and it’s aware of that (a contrast to the Jurassic Park dinos, who were created, but are not aware that they’re essentially abominations). The Outsider is one of the best monsters ever written.

I’ll wrap up with a relatively new favorite thing I have, one that’s not from the ’80s or ’90s, and that’s the Last Podcast on the Left. I suppose I’d call it a true crime podcast, though hosts Ben Kissell, Marcus Parks, and Henry Zebrowski delve into all manner of nasty topics, including serial killers, UFOs, cryptids, hauntings, and conspiracies. This favorite thing isn’t speculative because it’s all real. The show began in 2011, and by the hosts’ own admission the early episodes range from unlistenable to downright problematic. It had been recommended to me a few years ago and, a completist, I started at episode 1. Shut it off, no love. Found it obnoxious and crude. And I’m a person who likes crude. The hosts have now settled into a really nice format, and the show has evolved into top notch “edu-tainment.” Basically, Marcus reads a book and tells us about it. Henry usually does a little of his own research and does some funny voices. Ben represents the audience, going into the episodes with little prior knowledge of the day’s topic and reacting to the information disseminated by the other two. Since being able to quit his radio day job and devote all his time to the show, and hiring research assistants, Marcus Parks is a master researcher. I highly recommend the Jim Jones series (about ten hours of content spread over five episodes), the Donner Party, Bonnie and Clyde, and serial killer Israel Keyes. The show isn’t for everyone, but I think it’s a great combination of comedy and facts, and I love the fact that the hosts have listened to audience feedback to tone down what wasn’t working while still maintaining a unique voice.

So there you have it. A few of my favorite things. I still have the Alien franchise, The Thing, the complete works of Stephen King, and The Adventure Zone podcast to talk about, but this is all you get for today.

If it screams, squelches, or bleeds, Kristin Dearborn has probably written about it. She revels in comments like “But you look so normal…how do you come up with that stuff?” A life-long New Englander, she aspires to the footsteps of the local masters, Messrs. King and Lovecraft. When not writing or rotting her brain with cheesy horror flicks (preferably creature features!) she can be found scaling rock cliffs, zipping around Vermont on a motorcycle, or gallivanting around the globe. Her most recent releases are novellas Sacrifice Island and Woman in White from Crossroads Press.

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