Patrick Larose
ABOUT
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Patrick is a writer, editor, and developer with a life-long passion for stories in all their forms. He’s written critical essays, blogs and reviews covering video games, literature, comic books, and television.
Email: contact@patricklarose.me
Video Games Essays
“It’s easy to treat the spaces around these highways as empty. On those trips with my dad, cutting along the highway through Pennsylvania, Virginia, Alabama, and Louisiana, I would look out the window to see towns motionless and empty. Locked in our vehicles, speeding down the interstate, there’s a creeping sensation that we’re the only ones alive.”
“A human life creates clutter. From the books we keep around to the letters we can never manage to throw out. Our material stuff might never define us wholly, but they are intrinsic to the narratives we present and what we can’t help but show—they are the ghosts of specificity we leave behind on the places we live.”
“It felt natural, then, that in the game Night in the Woods, when the main character Mae Borowski plays with her freshly reformed, unnamed band of twenty-year-olds, their first song includes a chorus that’s more like a plea: I just wanna die anywhere else. If only I could die anywhere else. The lyrics are goofy, but undeniably earnest, and that descriptor does better to cover Night in the Woods than anything else could—it’s a game about going home to a dying small town.”
“In this way, crime fiction has stood out to become both popular and populist. When Dashiell Hammett has his gambler, Ned Beaumont, wear the hat of an amateur sleuth in The Glass Key, he may be friends with mob bosses, but the real threats prove to be politicians. Criminals are vulnerable, but the elite stay elite, so maybe this low-life outsider, wielding the same violence that’s used to shake down everyone else, can destabilize things.”
Comic Book Reviews and Essays
“Again, however, The Solar Grid is a comic book, and how we experience this conflict is embedded into the very sense of how we read it. For every person I’ve met who loved comics, there was another who couldn’t get through them. They didn’t understand how to follow the logic of the panels, which dialog bubbles to read first, or the layering of visuals. Being able to do this, however, is as important to comics as understanding punctuation and sentence structure is to reading.”
“We can never escape that what we’re seeing is a facsimile of a real conversation. The Vision,by telling a story about a superhero comic book family trying to lead a normal life, also shows us a conversation about a mainstream comic book fiction trying to follow literary fiction.”
“Rom was only ever a licensed product and when that license ran out, Marvel lost all rights to the character. Rom would never appear in another story. Marvel could never reprint the issues and sell a collection. The survival of Rom Spaceknight lives on only by the ability of those that remember and talk about Rom.”
Hadrian’s Wall #4 and the Art of Breaking Up
“The first time you see Simon and Annabelle together–they’re smiling. This is the future so they’re in a hover car but still they’re driving along the coastline at sunset, dumbly grinning and badly singing Tom Petty’s “American Girl.” A warm orange glow wraps around them and when they kiss, cartoon hearts fill the spaces between them.
This is not a happy memory. This is a cruel reminder.”
Literature
“So when The Heart in Exile embraces the genre and formula, it’s knowingly. Characters talk about going to see the new Humphrey Bogart movie, and the main character, a psychiatrist named Dr. Tony Page, longs to be placed in a novel and laments even that “the novel, I wished to live at this particular moment was a penny-dreadful, mystery story, was significant, because I always felt the penny-dreadful was the real novel.”
Television Reviews
“There’s a reason so many of Shakespeare’s plays end in tragedy. Why so many are filled with thankless if inevitable deaths and chaotically uprooted social structures. It’s that they’re made-up of people and people are selfish and destructive even when they want to do the right thing. Luke Cage, however, came with a promise of not being a tragedy. A bullet-proof black man entering the cultural consciousness at a time when we are surrounded by the real faces of wrongfully slain black men and women by the police promised to protect them.”
Review: Luke Cage E.04 – “Step in the Arena”
“Luke Cage’s history of a comic book character was born from the popularization of the Blaxploitation film genre during the 1970s. A bunch of white dudes caught on by how popular these action movies made by black people and starring black people were getting that they saw a new market to, well, exploit.
They didn’t do so gracefully.”
Patrick Larose: Writing, Editing, Games, and More 