RIP to FerretBrain, My Favorite Blog
FerretBrain is the inspiration for this humble blog. A pop-culture “e-zine” based in the UK, it provided extensive, sometimes exhaustive reviews of genre books, films, TV shows, video games, and the like; largely written by a staff of only a few writers. I use the past-tense because it is being shut down at the end of April, 2019. Many of the articles are reproduced elsewhere by their creators, but I would still advocate checking it out, before it’s too late. As editor “Arthur B.” says:
We have had a good run, but let’s face it: the expected lifespan of a ferret is some 6-10 years. We’re coming up to 12. That’s not half bad, but this place is no longer the lively, raucous zone it used to be. New sites have risen and fallen, the principles of good website design have moved on, social networking has given us all the enclaves for debating amazingly specific subjects we could possibly want, and the bar to setting up your own blog is low-to-nonexistent.
What community we had here has been winding down for a while, and I think at this point it’d be best for us various ferretneurons to drift off in our separate ways. We can stay friendly, we can even link and comment on each others’ content should we choose - but there’s no need for that purpose to be served by this platform any more.
I discovered FerretBrain a few years ago in the latter half of college, when I happened to stumble across their most important article, “We Need To Talk About Conan.” At the time, I was reading about the Lovecraft circle, and was stuck by the defensiveness and unreflectiveness of the fans of Conan the Barbarian author Robert E. Howard (a prolific correspondent with H.P. Lovecraft). This article is a complete review of Conan stories, noting their occasional strengths and frequent weaknesses, as well as pulp-era racist overtones and undertones. The article attracted a lot of attention, and had a comment thread much longer than the text itself. It reached the conclusion that there was little artistic merit to redeem these stories, and the same effect could be found in other, better, less problematic writings. I have a distinct memory of reading it on an Amtrak train with my phone plugged in at 1% battery, connecting to the WiFi so that the energy required to read it didn’t outpace the charge from the plug.
From there, I consider FerretBrain responsible for introducing me to my tastes in modern horror. In the years after college, I used the library to catch up on some historic horror (Algernon Blackwood, Robert W. Chambers, and the like); but turned to FerretBrain for more contemporary recommendations. They steered me to Ramsey Campbell, Adam Nevill, and Thomas Ligotti, all of whom became some of my favorite horror writers. Their fantasy selections were more mixed in my canon: I liked Neil Abercrombie well enough, but did not have a taste for K.J. Parker (both very grimdark fantasy writers).
My taste did not always align with theirs in the other direction, either; such as when they were lukewarm on “House of Leaves” or “Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.” Overall though, it was welcome to see some serious criticism brought to various genres of fiction, and I appreciated the progressive slant. I enjoyed many articles on media that I did not intend to consume at any point, partially because it was well-summarized, but also just for the commentary on the state of the genre. I was personally overjoyed when they decided to do a longform, eight-part Lovecraft retrospective, but there were many different interests, series, and projects for any fan to enjoy. Fanfiction? Warhammer novels? Gareth Marenghi? Twin Peaks tie-ins? Takedowns of J.K. Rowling, Ray Feist, that awful “300” movie from when I was a freshman? Ferretbrain had you covered, and I hope that you will still have an opportunity to read it.
(I have tried to link to reproduced versions of all articles)
[Edited Oct. 2019 to add Arthur B.’s quote]