The Tangential

Halloween Audiobook Review: “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”

About the book: Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella is deliciously spooky. Despite its concise length, it takes its time getting to the horror at its core. We first meet Utterson, the redoubtable attorney who trusts the best in human nature and simply cannot believe that his good friend Jekyll has been caught up with the atrocious Hyde.…

Halloween Audiobook Review: “Shock Value” and “Paperbacks From Hell”

About the books: Jason Zinoman cites Roger Ebert’s non-review of Night of the Living Dead as a telling inflection point in the history of horror film. He was taken aback at the shocked reactions of audience members, especially kids, who went expecting the tame thrills that had become standard by 1969. The change didn’t necessarily seem like…

“Halloween” Sequel and “The Fog” Restoration Give John Carpenter a Buzzworthy Year

In exploiting the serial-killer genre, as horror historian Grady Hendrix has put it, shockmeisters took advantage of the fact that “the scariest motive is no motive at all.” You can’t appease a killer like Michael Myers: all he wants is to make you dead. And you, and you, and you. Actually, there’s one special you,…

Halloween Audiobook Review: “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus”

About the book: Turning 200 this year, Mary Shelly’s classic is foundational to speculative fiction. Guillermo del Toro worships all things Frankenstein, and no wonder: it’s the quintessential sympathetic-monster trope. That said, the monster you’ll meet in these pages (or several hours of narration) is not the one that pop culture might have led you to expect.…

Movie Review: “The Hate U Give” is an American Tragedy with an Empowering Message

After seeing The Hate U Give, I tried to think back on what movies I saw as a (white, middle-class, Midwestern) teenager that might have taught me about racism. The best I could come up with were Dances with Wolves and La Bamba. When the 1992 L.A. riots happened, all the media I had to help me…

Movie Review: Neil Armstrong Biopic “First Man” Is a Stunning and Strange Apollo Epic

Before the Twin Cities preview screening of First Man, a University of Minnesota professor was invited to speak for a few minutes. NASA, he pointed out, still exists. “They make monthly videos explaining what they’re up to.” As we approach the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, an event that was presented to generations as…

A short history of The Tangential

The Tangential is a pop culture and creative writing blog launched in 2011 by three writers living in Minneapolis: Becky Lang (now Radecki), Jay Gabler, and Katie Sisneros. That was a golden age of irreverent confessional blogging, and over the first couple years we built a national following. Notably, we gained over 120,000 followers on Tumblr, where we were often associated with the provocative, extremely online writers in the movement known as alt lit. We created spinoff blogs including The Sport Hole, The Party Whip, The Tangential Ruins Minneapolis, and Tan Genitals. We hosted Minneapolis events and published three books.

We were having so much fun, in fact, that we never got around to monetizing. Oops! Well, we did have a little income from the books and events, and we became an Amazon affiliate. (This is your official disclosure that we subsidize our hosting costs via revenue from partner links.) Eventually, though, the editors and contributors who fueled the site’s early years largely moved on to other projects.

Today, The Tangential is run by Jay, who continues to publish criticism and other writing as well as to maintain the site’s catalog of posts — if only for, as we’ve always said, “the good of society.”