After years of adventures, My Hero Academia is now moving towards its conclusion. The bestselling manga on which the anime is based officially finished its ten-year run in August, 2024. As a result, the ending of the anime series is not far behind. The popular show with its fantastical character design and likeable, ensemble cast of young heroes-in-training has grown from a predictable kids adventure to a gritty exploration of cruelty and the human psyche. Season 6 gave fans a grim battleground between the villains and heroes, played out while the disenchanted population became unsure of who to trust. Season 7 continues the dramatic departure from the optimistic vibe of the early seasons, but the story has pivoted from nihilism to the long awaited final conflicts.

Finally, a Terminator sequel that makes a good case for its existence

Terminator Zero exists in the nebulous space between two incompatible truths: (a) in the real world, T2 was a perfect ending after which every subsequent movie has been not only unnecessary but atrociously bad, and (b) in the fictional world, it would have been strategically suboptimal for Skynet to send just one or two killer robots to the past. The solution that this new animated series finds is to acknowledge all the timelines: instead of one single history that gets overwritten with each time jump, we're presented with infinitely branching realities. The implication is that Skynet is unwittingly wasting its efforts in trying to readjust a past that by its very readjustment no longer connects to it, while the human resistance is making continuous sacrifices in the hope of creating a separate timeline where Skynet is defeated. You can go back and save humankind, but your humankind is still stuck in the bad future.

So, for example, although it's not spelled out in the show, T2 is now assumed to have created a timeline where the world didn't end in 1997, but it did end a bit later in T3, as well as another timeline where, even though Skynet was never created, Legion took its place (i.e. Terminator: Dark Fate), plus whatever timey-wimey mess is supposed to be going on behind the scenes in Terminator: Genisys. One could imagine there's even space for The Sarah Connor Chronicles in some other branch of time.

Besides avoiding the easy petty choice to invalidate previous entries in the franchise, this new theory of time travel creates a fruitful avenue for a season-long discussion on the futility of human endeavors. If you devote your entire life to saving a future that you won't get to personally experience... wait, that sounds exactly like the real world. Terminator Zero takes the fantasy of fixing everything with time travel and drags it down to Earth. Time travel is not the panacea for historical mistakes. It's simply a factory of opportunities that you take at the cost of abandoning your previous life and leaving it unchanged.

This retcon not only solves the problem of the mutually incompatible timelines in the movies made after T2 (answer: they all happened), but also brings the world of Terminator emotionally closer to human viewers. It's difficult to empathize with characters who are exempt from the fundamental tragedy of the human condition. By nerfing the scope of what time travel can fix, Terminator Zero makes its stakes feel closer to us. One character makes this theme explicit: making sacrifices for a better future that will not benefit you is what separates humans from machines.

This plea for human worth isn't without opposition. Skynet calculated that its survival required human extinction, but it drew that conclusion from human-made data. We taught it the argument against us. Could another machine reach a different conclusion from a blank slate? Throughout the season, a programmer who knows more than he initially lets on has an extended debate with a secret machine that he has designed and that he hopes will save humankind from Skynet. The irony of their interaction is that they don't yet trust each other enough to reveal the arguments that would convince them to trust each other. Perhaps human overcaution will end up signaling to the machine that there's stuff worth being overcautious about.

Terminator Zero is set in Tokyo in the few hours before and after Skynet's awakening. This is a great choice: it makes perfect sense that the future factions would be facing off in other battlegrounds apart from the Connor family. A Terminator story should be about the fate of the species, not about the Great Man theory of history. In this timeline, Skynet's first attack against humans isn't prevented, but a potential rival machine emerges. Which side it will take remains an open question.

All this happens while, as usual, a human and a robot arrive from the future and start playing cat and mouse. The intriguing bit is that the human fighter keeps alluding to a version of the future that doesn't quite match the one we know from all the previous movies. As for the robot, it has a non-obvious agenda that complicates the plot in interesting directions. Without spoiling too much, I'll just present this dilemma: what choice do you make when you meet someone who claims to already know what you will choose?

The plot is served well by the quality of the animation, in which I can't find any fault. Even for a series where numerous skulls are crushed, limbs are ripped off, and flesh melts away under a nuclear hellstorm, the violence isn't depicted for shock value. The killer robots look appropriately creepy, both in human guise and once bits of it have been torn; and the human drama sustains a balance of enough revelation and enough mystery episode after episode.

I must admit I hadn't suspected how much a series like Terminator Zero was needed. It has been long noted that science fiction made in Japan has a very different attitude toward robots compared to Western science fiction. Here we classify the world in dichotomies, starting with human/nonhuman, and everything nonhuman must be either kept under control or kept away from us. In the Japanese mindset, every object has a spirit, so it's not threatening for a robot to acquire human-level intelligence. In the Western tradition, to create life is to usurp the role of divinity, which is how we ended up with the cautionary tale that is Frankenstein, while Japanese animism sees divinity spread all across nature, which is how they ended up with the joyful tale that is Astro Boy.

So it's fascinating that Terminator Zero takes the time to dwell on our relationship with domestic helper robots, toy cat robots, and a hypothetical sentient machine that sees itself as having not only a mind, but also a heart and a spirit. One cannot refute this character's protest against being considered a tool or a weapon; it would be immoral to do it to a human, so it should be immoral to do it to anything of equivalent intelligence. However, what this machine chooses to do with humans isn't acceptable either.

Like The Matrix: Resurrections, Terminator Zero speaks of a more complex stage of the war, in which humans and machines can make alliances for strategic reasons. I don't know whether this series will have more seasons, but apparently the trick for writing, at long last, a worthy successor to T2 was to change the stakes of the war to anything other than zero-sum, and that's a scenario I want to see explored in deeper detail.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

A modern-day reimagining of the ancient Greek gods works spectacularly well in a way that has the the vision of Homer, the aesthetics of Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet, and the toxic family dynastic dynamics of Succession. (Spoiler-free)

Sing to me, O muse, of the latest Netflix show, which blew away nearly all of my expectations. Many were the episodes that left me in awe or screaming at the screen.

In 2018, I played Assassin's Creed: Odyssey for a solid six months, and it revived in me an Ancient Greek renaissance. I devoured as much content as I could about my favorite world. I read Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles and Circe, and I bought every second-hand old copy of Greek myths I could find. I even made a hat with Athena's owl on the front. 

So needless to say, I'm a fan of Olympian deities. 

This new series, the brain child of Charlie Covell, sets our favorite gods in modern day Greece, complete with cars, phones, yachts that only Poseidon could afford (and who could also most likely fend off those orcas taking down ships these days). 

I know what you're thinking — another cliched "modern-day retelling" rehash. 

This one's different. It's incredible. 

The characters and their portrayals are truly entrancing and worth watching 

Jeff Goldblum, of course, is the all-mighty Zeus, and he perfectly captures the insecure, bombastic, and slightly pathetic characteristics of the king of the gods. He's actually playing against type in Kaos, and you don't get the typical "Life, uh, finds a way" moments of Goldblum-ness that usually pop up in his works. 

Janet McTeer is Hera, Zeus' wife and arguably one of the show's most interesting characters — let alone one of the most interesting and powerful portrayals of Hera I've ever witnessed. 

Debi Mazar plays Medusa, everyone's favorite Gorgon. She is so effortlessly cool and intense, and she keeps her snakes under a head scarf to not intimidate people. 

Eddie/Suzy Izzard is one of the three fates — the women in charge of the destiny of every living being. As a fan of Izzard's standup, this was just truly magical to watch.

World-building that rivals the slick and ready feel the John Wick movies

Creating a believable universe for our pantheon of gods to inhabit isn't exactly easy, and even traditional depictions of them have been a bit sparse on the actual domestic details. Yes, Zeus wears a toga and is usually an old white man with gray hair. Mount Olympus, their lofty home, seems more like a big, Grecian-columned room en plein-air more than anything, though. 

Not so with Kaos. Olympus is a sprawling magnificent Italianate villa, even featuring the palace where parts of Naboo from The Phantom Menace were shot. The gods are waited on by dutiful, tennis-attired ball boys. 

Down on Earth, though, there's even more fun stuff. Hera has an entire line of nuns called tacitas that are tongueless (not unlike the avoxes in The Hunger Games) who hear confessions from humans. She can access these confessions right from a room off her bedroom in Olympus, because Hera is a freak.

I could go on and on with the smallest of details— from a box of Spartan Crunch cereal to the fact that Eurydice and Orpheus live in a place called Villa Thrace — because this show is so well done. And if you're a Greek myth nerd, it will definitely demand rewatching. 

Tapping into the emotional truth of mythic characters but straying from actual retellings

It's got all the big themes that have been making stories entertaining for millenia

--

The Math

Baseline Score: 9/10

Bonuses: I couldn't have imagined a more perfect cast; the soundtrack is superb, including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Elastica, the Kills, and more; it makes me want to re-dive into my love of Greek myth.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

What you don't know will absolutely hurt you

That the über-rich act as if they were exempt from the law of the land, common rules of courtesy, and basic human decency isn't news to anybody. Nor is their disturbingly common tendency to build secret lairs that keep the world out (and its pesky laws). And the disingenuous non-apology apology has become the rare genre of drama where bad men all recite the same lines while hoping no one will remember the spectacle.

Zoë Kravitz's debut as a film director, Blink Twice, points an irate finger at the uselessness of the public apology tour. The story is deceptively simple: a working-class woman crashes an exclusive party for billionaires, gets the attention of a sketchy creep with money, and joins his entourage for a tropical getaway at his private island. Soon enough, we learn that the reason this place is disconnected from the world is exactly what you were suspecting when you bought your movie ticket.

During the first half, the storytelling is cleverly anchored on what it's not showing: at the private island, our protagonist finds all the gourmet dishes, cocktails, sunny afternoons at the swimming pool, and wild drug-fueled parties that anyone would imagine the 1% have an endless supply of. This goes on day after day until you suddenly wonder: hey, if this is supposed to be a hedonistic extravaganza of excess and licentiousness... where's the sex? What we've seen so far is surprisingly chaste.

What are we not seeing?

Of course, it turns out there is sex on this private island, and oh boy does it make you wish you hadn't seen anything.

The modus operandi of the villains in this story is a terrifying logical extension of what happens in real life: the focus isn't on not doing evil, but on not getting caught. If you're used to controlling thousands of subordinates, it's easy to be lured by the prospect of controlling perception and memory. The same sociopathic traits behind the harmful actions of powerful people can produce elaborate mechanisms of deceit. Nothing to see here, keep going, don't believe your own eyes.

Channing Tatum plays the main villain with a dramatic potency I never suspected he had, especially in a tense scene toward the end, where his character spells out his worldview with raw fury. Maybe this achievement in acting should be attributed to Kravitz's direction, which makes the whole feat even more artistically interesting: she's crafted a burning portrait of evil from the image of her real-life fiancé.

Blink Twice has a mystery plot, but it's very direct about it. There are no layers of symbolism or allegory. It could be because the message it conveys needs to be shouted clearly: #MeToo has been a big necessary step, but it's been far from enough. Roman Polanski still walks free. And Woody Allen. And Bryan Singer, and Bill Cosby, and Brett Ratner, and Louis C.K., and James Franco, and Kevin Spacey, and untold numbers of other perpetrators who haven't been exposed yet. It hits hard to watch Blink Twice while the Neil Gaiman case is still unfolding.

It's a no-brainer to empathize with this protagonist, but I'm ambivalent about the revenge fantasy with which the movie ends. After the secondary villains have been dispatched with bloody gusto, the final boss gets trapped forever in the bliss of ignorance. One thing I'll grant is that this choice leads to an important point of discussion: what's an appropriate punishment for unrepentant abusers?

Blink Twice is an effective thriller that knows how to maintain high tension even long after all the secrets have been revealed. The trick it plays on the viewer is the same one abusers execute on their victims: it's absolutely obvious that something very wrong is happening, but as long as no one acknowledges it, the pretense can continue.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

A stunning science fantasy novel with a strong theme and timely and resonant message underpinning a strong character study. 

Science fantasy seems to be having a moment again. The peanut butter and chocolate of the two main halves of speculative fiction are once again meeting in the middle with novels that combine the technological speculation of science fiction with the social structures, and sometimes outright magic and the unexplainable elements of fantasy. Gary K. Wolfe considers science fantasy as an SFF story that you can read as a science fiction story, a fantasy story, or both at the same time, which is as good a definition of science fantasy as you can get. 

So it is with Samantha Mills The Wings Upon Her Back, Mills' first full length novel. If you have read Mills before, it is probably the story "Rabbit Test". This is rather different and shows her range. Here, Mills sets us up in the city state of Radezhda, where all of our action takes place. Long ago, five deities visited the city and uplifted the civilization of the city, ancient aliens style. The power and technology they have given the city are not completely comprehended by the residents but it is enough for them to assert their independence and defense from the rest of the world. Those gods are mostly sleeping now, leaving their mortal Voices to commune with them, occasionally get news or judgments, and contribute to the welfare of the city. 

Our main character is Zenya. Although born under the auspices of the god dedicated to learning and knowledge, she has always dreamed of flying, of being a warrior. We start the novel, then, with her showing a dissident a small act of mercy, for which as a reward for her years of loyal service, both to the warriors and personally to their leader Vodaya, with being stripped of her biomechanical wings, and left to die. It's when she is found by the real revolutionaries that the plot really kicks off, as Zenya has a painful coming to terms of who she is, what she has done.

This comes to us in a narrative set in the present day, following the events of her being cast out, and in a parallel narrative, we get to see how Zenya became Winged Zemolai. Mills cleverly uses the flashback sequences in a threefold sense. First and foremost, we get the full character arc of Zenya, how and why she became the woman she was, who is both a fearless warrior with wings, and yet someone who showed that act of mercy. Second, we get to see how and why the city has strayed and moved from a path of five representatives of the various gods cooperating into the brutal authoritarian rule of Vodaya. This strand of the novel is frankly an out and out blueprint of how fascist and authoritarian societies emerge from innocuous beginnings. And third, mixing the two, we see how the toxic relationship between Zenya and Vodaya came to be, growing and flourishing in its poisonousness. This also serves as a character study of Vodaya herself, showing how a fascist leader can emerge and take power, but also, it shows just how seductive and alluring such a leader and their ideology and methods can be, especially to a young and impressionable youth such as Zenya. Seeing Vodaya use and manipulate the young Zenya is a horrifying masterclass in such psychological techniques. 

The novel can be relentless at times, because in the present day narrative, Zenya has fallen with true and real revolutionaries who are seeking to stop the authoritarian tyranny that Vodaya has instituted. These are not protesters hanging up signs, this is a movement with cells, goals, and that can and will use violence to achieve their ends. Zenya really has gone from the frying pan of being the hand of Vodaya to falling in with a group that trusts her not at all but is willing to to kill and do damage in order to oppose the tyrannical rule, as well as torture, and also manipulate prisoners and those not trusted, including of course, Zenya. 

But I want to go back to the science fantasy nature of this novel and explore briefly, how it fits into that context.

How can one read this in both modes? A city-state where technology-as-magic allows for biomechanical wings, and five sleeping gods whose worshipers squabble and try and interpret what their gods want to do and why, and feeling lost and forgotten, is definitely a fantasy setting if I ever heard one. The novel fits my medium stakes and "city-state fantasy" paradigm rather well - if you read the novel in a fantasy mode.

And yet this is also a science fiction novel. The technobabble of the wings refers to "ports" and there are flying boats, bombs, and even (although not really named as such) an EMP device. There is very heretical thought that the gods aren't gods at all, but rather are ancient aliens who came, gave some technology to the people of the city, but mostly now for reasons unknown, are asleep and not generally reachable on a regular basis. 

There is an additional piece within the novel, a plot point/MacGuffin that becomes extremely important to the unfolding of the plot. I don't want to give it away because it becomes such an important hinge later in the novel, but the fact that it can be read either as technology or as something in a fantasy mode helps solidly that science fantasy is indeed the axis that this novel very deliberately spins around.

In the end, the world of the novel is a world where both sides do very dirty things, and neither side's hands are clean. The Wings Upon Her Back, though, grounds this all in Zenya, and thanks to the dual narratives, we slowly close the loop and fully understand Zenya. Why would she find service to the mecha god instead of "her" scholar god in the first place, how her brutal training, physically and psychologically molded her to be Vodaya's creature, and how the seeds of her (at first) mild disillusionment came to be in the first place. 

But even with Zenya in the rebellion and opposing Vodaya, her toxic and disturbing relationship to her old life and her relationship with Vodaya always comes to the for, and Vodaya, besides Zenya, has staying power as the most memorable and darkly compelling aspect of the novel. Vodaya has spent years molding Zenya, and this novel could be read as a story of deprogramming. The deprogramming is twofold, first of all Zenya herself from Vodaya and her toxic methods, and the deprogramming of an entire society which has been molded to be brutal, uncompromising, fascist, and authoritarian. The novel shows that it is a painful and not easy process, and there are no simple magic bullets or answers for either. I felt strongly for Zenya especially in the flashback scenes, as Mills makes what Vodaya is doing to her plain and unmistakable. 

And again, given the rise of authoritarianism around the world, and those it impacts, what Vodaya goes through feels timely and relevant.

The last part of the book, then, has in the flashback sequences Zenya taking her first flight with her wings, showing her joy at the pinnacle of her triumph as a youth, and in the present, Zenya recreating that journey, without wings, older, wiser, and irrevocably changed by her experiences. It's a potent and strong ending to a potent and strong novel. The novel is complete in one volume and there really isn't, as far as I can see, need or room for a sequel hook. 

--

The Math

Highlights:

• A potent and important story of authoritarianism and what it does to a society and people
• A strong science fantasy hybrid
• An unflinching look at a protagonist and the character who manipulates and molds her

You can read more about the book, and Samantha Mills, in my Six Books interview about her.

Reference:Mills, Samantha,The Wings Upon her Back [Tachyon, 2024]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

A disappointing use of interesting ideas that never manages to fully engage with the framework it lives within.

Some books' endings, I can look at them and go... well, this isn't for me, I don't like how this went, but I can see how someone might. I often find this with ambiguous endings. Sometimes they hit just right, sometimes they pass me by, but I get that they're someone's jam. You can probably see where I'm going with this. I hated the ending of Asunder. I left a few days between reading it and writing this review, letting my thoughts percolate, and the thing I keep circling back to is how everything is tied up at/after the big finale, and how deeply, frustratingly unsatisfying I found it. I struggle to see, in a way that is not often the case, how this would work for anyone. I'm clearly wrong and it does, because I've seen praise for it! So much praise! But it is beyond the scope of my comprehension. Which is a shame, because it all comes down to something that's worked through the entire narrative, something that I think has promise, that is clearly thoughtful, clearly deliberate, something that left me slightly wrong-footed (in a good way, mostly), and trying to figure out exactly where the story was going, and what is was going to be.

It all comes down to expectations.

I could talk about the worldbuilding of Asunder, I can talk about the characterisation (both fine, trending good), I can talk about the plotting (fine) and the pacing (mixed). But that's not what's interesting about it, as a novel, so I'm not going to bother. Instead, I'm going to focus on the thing about it that I think makes it stand out* - exactly how it interacts with genre conventions, and the expectations that the weight of the existing corpus impose on/instill in readers. More than anything, while I was reading it, I was constantly uncertain about exactly what sort of a thing Asunder wanted to be, a quality in a book that has the potential to deliver an absolutely stellar story... or a distinctly mediocre one. Take The City and the City by China Miéville, as an example. The way that it plays with your understanding of whether or not there are genre elements in play is key to the impact of the finale. Not everything has to do it to quite that extreme, but it's a great example of how subverting the expectations of the reader can deliver something wonderful. There's also The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo, for something more recent, or The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton. Books that play with exactly what kind of a story you're dealing with can deliver magic. Or... they can feel muddled, uncertain, unfinished things. I still haven't quite decided which one Asunder is, for me.

If you look at the fantasy genre, especially mainstream, tradpubbed novels, right now, and doubly especially ones with a female protagonist, it is very often the default for those stories to contain an element of romance. Not necessarily to quite the extent of romantasy, but a strong thread lying alongside the main plot, supporting the character development and helping to deliver a satisfying ending on an emotional level. It's another kind of payoff, another way for your hero(ine) to get their just deserts (or righteous comeuppance, or tragic crescendo, depending on how the romance plays out). So when Asunder gave me a female character who ends up stuck with a newly-met male character inside her head, having to become comfortable with that incredible, infuriating intimacy after a hard and lonely life... well, the cues were cue-ing, right? And then he turns out to be nice! But he has some mysteries... ohoho I know where this goes, yes? Except... it doesn't. It hints. It lets you wonder. But it also has the cute scholar she meets at the university flirt with her, help her more than she expects and ask her out to dinner. Is that just friendship or the start of something more? And then you meet someone from her childhood, and there are hints that maybe what they felt for one another was more than just friendship... or are there? No, really, are there?? Or am I just imagining it because I am so thoroughly, constantly used to seeing romance in my fantasy novels that I'm trying to figure out where it's going to come from, ending up jumping at ghosts?

That was my experience, for a lot of reading Asunder. Such hints as there are, for a good chunk of the book, are so gentle, so subtle, that I found myself second-guessing them and myself. And it wasn't just the romance. The story also sets up what seem like familiar structures, only to never quite grasp them and move onto something new instead, leaving behind a trail of brief encounters across the scenery of this imagined world. There are moments where the story veers political, and then drifts away again, just as it meanders towards adventures and heists and crime and magic and gods and empire, never quite committing itself to fully delving into any one box it opens. But nor do these disparate elements ever feel like their variety coheres into something greater than the sum of its parts. If anything, it reminds me of the structure of a myth, a fairytale, where events just sort of... keep eventing, until an unseen clock runs out and it's time to have a resolution now. A story unbeholden to the logic of the meta. I don't necessarily hate that. But I never felt like I could settle down into it either, I could never get comfortable enough to immerse myself fully into what it was giving me.

And then on top of all that there's a whole other bunch of expectations that don't quite have anything to do with the book itself. I came into this having seen a number of people talking positively, enthusiastically, nay even ecstatically about it. So, naturally, my expectations were set pretty high; I was waiting to be stunned. I never quite was.

It's like reading books for awards. The frame of reference you bring with you to the reading experience necessarily colours it. No one can read a text free from context. You can do your best, if it's something you want to strive for - I tend not to read proper, deep reviews of books I know I'm going to have to read with purpose (either for a review or for awards judging/voting), for example - but you can never truly free yourself from it. After all, something has to be the prompt to read the book, right?

And, just like many times where I've read an award shortlist, Asunder suffers because I'm holding it up to this unfairly high standard. It's not, for me, a stellar book. It's not world shattering, not emotionally devastating. It's fine. It's... probably a little unmemorable, but so are the vast majority of stories. It treads familiar ground in familiar ways, changing some of the aesthetics, the vibes, but ultimately delivering the sort of standard fare that the genre thrives on, because not everything can (or should) be a work of deathless prose that lasts through the ages. But much like the expectations the story framework set up around romance, around plot points, I am incapable of seeing past the expectations set by the critical response I've seen before reading - and it simply does not live up to either set.

For the genre ones, there are two reasons I could see for this - is it playing with my expectations and it's simply not working for me, or is it failing to craft them at all, and what I'm seeing is the baggage I have brought with me, unasked? I'm unsure to what extent it is which of those. If it is the latter, I do think this is something of a failure by the book - it's leaving something on the table that could be put to use crafting the story into something tighter and more thoughtful.

In any case, we now come back to the crux of the problem with how those expectations are crafted and managed throughout the story - the ending. For every genre, there are some assumptions about what the story's end might look like, whether as rigid as the happily ever after of true romance, or the less formalised but no less present mores about a satisfying wrap up of threads that tends to accompany traditional SFF. Asunder... neither meets them, nor convincingly flouts them in a way that feels deliberate. It instead does the secret third thing (confuses me). By the time we get towards the conclusion of the story, some of the less clear aspects of plot and interpersonal dynamics have been spelled out, and we begin to see the shape of what the ending might look like. There's a glimmer of some possible goal that maybe the characters will achieve, or maybe fail to achieve, but there could be pathos either way in that. And then the story drops into a big dramatic scene, one that feels perhaps longer than it needed to be, that is all action and tension and then... well. It's hard to discuss this without explicit spoilers, but essentially, neither the good nor the bad ending comes to pass, and instead various threads are simply dropped. We're robbed of the catharsis in either direction. There's a hint that resolution could come later, maybe? Sort of? There's a solid impression that things will continue in the next book. But what felt like a genuine framework had finally been set up, and then is entirely ignored in how things shake out. It was the worst sort of cliffhanger ending, rejecting any sense that the first book in a series needs to also function as a contained narrative, as well as a part of the wider whole.

Perhaps Hall has been playing with the reader's expectations all along, and this final subversion of the norms of story resolution is just the pièce de resistance? It's perfectly possible, I suppose. But if so, it entirely fails for me. Without some sort of emotional conclusion, even one that is less impactful and necessarily subordinate to the longer term one that will come in the sequels, the story feels unnaturally abbreviated. I see no benefit to the end state of things that has been brought by this subversion, and the cost is of any satisfaction with how events played out, just after I finally dared to hope there might be something to cling onto.

Especially when this is sat alongside what is quite a quotidien story in how it crafts a fantasy narrative, I find it hard to think it's just a clever decision that has passed me by. In something more nakedly ambitious in its approach, I might buy it, but it feels like "right at the end" is not the correct moment to unleash as-yet-untapped seams of narrative anarchy. Certainly, by doing it that way, the story seems doomed to please no one - those who want full weird, full subversion, don't get it for the vast majority of the book and so remain mostly unsatisfied, and those who wants the more traditional structure feel cheated of their conclusion. Who is this designed for, exactly? Who actually likes cliffhangers?

However much I talk like I know what I'm on about here, obviously I can't account for authorial intent. I'm not psychic. And also, frankly, it doesn't really matter (up to a point, at least). But the perception of intentionality matters a great deal - whether or not I enjoy a book is going to change enormously depending on whether it feels composed and deliberate vs just... a bunch of things happening with no particular coherent drive. It such a hard thing to quantify because it's something that so often comes down to "feeling". And whatever Hall was actually wanting and doing here, the feeling I get from it is a muddled one, of a story that hasn't quite been pinned down into a coherent place, nor with a clear signal of how the readers will interact with it. When you remove that, when you remove that clear sense of purpose, what remains is a bunch of perfectly fine ideas, characters and events, but without the soul that makes them into something substantial. It's a shame, because those ideas, characters and events are perfectly fine, but this is too big of a problem for any of them to overcome. They need tying together, and it simply does not feel like they have been.

*Being brutally honest, in those categories combined, I think this a perfectly fine but unexceptional book, the likes of which I have read a number of times before and will again. If you like trad fantasy but updated to more modern mores - great, have at it. If there's a downside to it, it's that the events of the story feel a little bit "a thing then a thing then another thing" rather than something with a definitive structure and drive. There's your tl;dr review.

--

The Math

Highlights: interesting world, pleasant characters, cool pseudo-warlocky magical powers

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Reference: Kerstin Hall, Asunder [Tordotcom, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Not so much beating an undead horse, more like apathetically poking it with a stick

In case the term "revival" wasn't suggestive enough, the ongoing sequelitis in the moviemaking world has many times been compared to unabashed necromancy. Although sequels to 1988's Beetlejuice were attempted a number of times, the capricious stars that preside over Hollywood refused to align until this century. The result is undeniably funny, but at the lowest-effort level. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice recycles many of the original's jokes and even copies its method of defeating the villain, and the new material it introduces is so underutilized that one wonders what's the point of having it in the movie.

When we first met the titular trickster ghost, he was a fearsome presence, menacing and treacherous. His day job was to terrorize the living, and his driving motivation was to escape the afterlife and enter our world permanently. In the sequel, his menace factor has been disappointingly defanged. No longer an irreverent troublemaker, he's now a businessman in friendly terms with the ghost police. In other words, he's become exactly the type of comfortable bourgeois that the first movie delighted in mocking. And the script gives him a decades-long obsession with the girl he tried to marry, which is a grave misunderstanding of his character. His attempted marriage to a human girl was merely a means to an end. This movie not only says that he still wants to marry her, but makes it his central goal, a plot point that ends up being key to him becoming exactly what he should never be: the hero who saves the day.

(The script pretends that the actual hero is Jenna Ortega's character, but it's Beetlejuice who fixes the big problem the movie centers on, although he does it very quickly and with little emotional impact, while Ortega's character gets a grand, dramatic, climactic moment for an action of negligible consequence, right before she gets a small, undramatic moment for a much more important one. I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum: the first action is to incur near-lethal danger to save Beetlejuice from a punishment he probably deserves, and the second action is to quote a legal technicality to save her mother from eternal agony. This movie is very confused about which stakes we should care about.)

Instead of the sharp-witted, opinionated girl we all had a crush on in the first Beetlejuice, adult Lydia Deetz is an anxious mess with a selective color-blindness to red flags. Her character comes off as so passive, so fragile, so easy to manipulate and so scared of everything that at times I wondered whether Winona Ryder had gotten confused and thought she was playing Joyce Byers from Stranger Things.

Speaking of badly written female characters, Monica Bellucci got a terrible deal out of this movie. She's given a fascinating backstory, impressive makeup, scary superpowers, several scenes of escalating setup, and then she's dispatched without a thought. She may as well not have been in the movie. The same confusing choice is made with Willem Dafoe's character, who, given the events of the plot, would be expected to play a pivotal part, but he's reduced to a recurring joke that gets tiresome the first time and ultimately has no effect on the story. These two characters are very good concepts that would have been better used in a different movie. Here, they just occupy space.

And then we get to Jenna Ortega's character, whose arc reveals the scriptwriters's biggest mistake: they treat Lydia's antipathy toward her shallow, greedy stepmother as a phase she had to outgrow, so they write Lydia's daughter as having the same relationship with her. This gives the movie a conservative vibe: parents are always right, kids had better listen, and rebelliousness is foolish. All of young Lydia's edginess has been meticulously sandpapered.

This is a pity, because the relationship between Lydia and her daughter is the emotional pillar that sustains the whole movie. At its core, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is about a mother and a daughter who desperately wish to connect but don't know how, and finally get the push they need when they're each targeted by social predators. In a better version of this movie, the characters played by Bellucci (a spiritual parasite with a long trail of victims) and Dafoe (a poser in a role he can't play convincingly) should have provided thematic resonance to the dangers that Lydia and her daughter face in the human world, but, as I said above, they're barely there.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice makes up for all its faults with genuinely funny absurdity. But one misses the acerbic critique of its predecessor (Beetlejuice shares with Ghostbusters the brilliant premise of a group of jaded New Yorkers whose first impulse upon discovering that the paranormal is real is to monetize it). Michael Keaton's character is reduced to a family-friendly echo of his former, funnier self. But the worst choice in this movie is to add to the postmortem hellscape of eternal bureaucracy a next realm of blissful rest. I'm reminded of the 1975 season of Tom & Jerry, where the mortal enemies were rewritten as adventuring partners. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice waters down precisely the parts that were interesting about the original. There's a bit of unintentional irony in the fact that this movie contains a line that makes fun of Disney, even though it follows the same Disney modus operandi of sanitizing a scary world to render it inoffensive. Like its titular character, this movie is exactly the thing it pretends to criticize.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Nigerian spirits do a heist at the British Museum, but struggle to deliver on the promises of that brilliant conceit

Cover illustration by Jim Tierny

This book is a welcome breath of fresh air into the pantheon of stories about gods and humans. No longer are we revisiting the familiar names from Norse mythology and Greek mythology, perpetually retold and reused and recycled, with genuinely fresh takes few and far between. Instead, Wole Talabi is presenting us with a pantheon that many Western readers, or readers from the Global North, will find unfamiliar: that of the orishas, or the divine spirits from Yoruba mythology. The titular Shigidi is a very minor orisha, whose responsibilities involve sitting on a sleeper’s chest to engender nightmares, and eventually suffocate the life out of the victim.

It’s not a very nice job, and Shigidi’s physical form matches that valence: he is small, squat, and ugly. But he doesn’t really have any control over it. He works for the Orisha Spirit Company—has, in fact, been created solely for the position he now holds—and he must navigate the familiar corporate challenges of unfriendly supervisors, reductions in human prayers which cut into the company’s bottom line, and competitors in the field who have their own plans for the victim he’s been sent to nightmare-suffocate. One such competitor is a succubus, Nneoma, but after a heated exchange of views they decide to team up and go freelance. This puts the team in the perfect position to take a job from Shigidi’s erstwhile boss: namely, to make their way into the British Museum and retrieve the titular MacGuffin, the Brass Head of Obalufon.

So: we have an erotic (because succubus) heist, featuring Yoruba gods stealing back their cultural artifacts from the British Museum, with a bonus commentary on modern corporate drudgery. This is so awesome on so many levels. The opportunities to do brilliant things with this narrative conceit are boundless.

And so many of them were missed.

I really, really don’t want to write the rest of this review. I wanted this book to be so much better than it was. It could have been so much better than it was. And I think, on the whole, that each missed opportunity is reasonably small, so if you think the conceit sounds awesome, then maybe you should stop reading right now, buy this book, and enjoy it. Maybe you won’t be bothered by the things that bothered me, and that would be ideal.

But if you are curious, or perhaps you’ve already read this book and were dissatisfied, read on, and perhaps what comes next will resonate with you, as I try to articulate why this book disappointed me.

First, the narrative does the thing where the timeline jumps around. So we start in medias res, with Shigidi bleeding out in the back of a cab, his arm ripped off, blood everywhere, monsters chasing them—clearly something has gone badly wrong. Nneoma tells him she loves him. Fade to black. OK, cool—I’m engaged, I want to know how they got into such a fix.

But the remainder of the timeline jumping around just didn’t work—to the point that after the second or third hop, I started looking at the copyright page and the acknowledgements to see if I’d somehow missed a Book 1 in this series. Things that hadn’t happened yet were being referred to and briefly summarized, as if I was expected to remember them from a previous book. Then, when those events finally take place, twenty or fifty pages later, they feel redundant and pointless, because I had already gotten that ‘remember when this happened?’ summary earlier in the book.

One case in point is the events surrounding Shigidi and Nneoma’s decision to team up and go freelance. We hear about that as a done deal from the past, before the narrative jumps backward and shows us how it happened. In principle, this could be useful for elaborating on another component of the narrative—not the specific plot-based events, perhaps, but certainly the character arc surrounding Shigidi and Nneoma’s relationship. A continuing thread involves Shigidi trying to get Nneoma to admit to loving him, which she is unwilling to do for backstory reasons. This plays out in various conversations, one of which, infuriatingly, takes place during an extremely time-constrained heist. Priorities, people! But the point is: the whole question around Nneoma's admission of love doesn’t matter. We already know that Nneoma’s going to eventually say that she loves him. It happened on page 3! It was resolved before we knew it was important! So there’s no tension or uncertainty surrounding that plot arc, which means all the jumping forward and backward serves no purpose, except to make me wonder whether I picked up Book 2 by mistake.

Next, let’s talk about Shigidi himself. He’s created to be a small, ugly, minor god, and physically he is small and ugly. He doesn’t like his job, he doesn’t like his appearance; he’s miserable in all aspects of his life. There is such richness here to explore, from divine work-life balance; self-perception (what is ‘ugly’ when you are divine?); body-image and views of beauty. For example, one component of Shigidi’s ‘ugliness’ is scarification marks. Scarification, Wikipedia tells us, is the act of scratching or cutting patterns into one’s skin, after which follow-up treatment, such as repeated irritation, or packing clay or ash into the wound, ensures that the healing process leaves visible scars in the pattern of the original wounds. It is a deliberate, culturally significant procedure in many parts of the world, and if you click through to the Wikipedia entry, you can see that the results of this undoubtedly painful procedure can, in fact, be quite beautiful. To be sure, Westerners don’t particularly care for the practice, and so Christian missionaries in Africa spoke against the procedure, and colonial governments straight-out criminalized it. So, in sum, scarification and its relationship to beauty—especially in the context of orishas—raises some very deep questions! Why does Shigidi consider his own scarification ugly? What is his relationship with the culture whose patterns are etched into his body, that he thinks so poorly of them? What is beauty to an orisha, and why do specifically Western human beauty standards apply to him?

We never find out. Shigidi is ugly, doesn’t like being ugly, and pretty much the first thing he does after meeting Nneoma is allow her to remake his body into something super hot and muscled and glistening and abs-full. Through the power of sex-magic, to be sure, because Nneoma is a succubus, so there’s a certain amount of orgasmic potency to his transformation. That’s fine, I guess. Talabi wanted to write an erotic thriller, and this is one way to do that. But by doing that, he disregards all of the really interesting issues implied in Shigidi’s self-image as a corporate drudge. Shigidi was ugly. That lasted less than 40 pages. Then he becomes hot. Next.

OK, next: let’s talk a bit about Shigidi’s status as a corporate drone. This was so promising. I love the idea of a pantheon of gods operating according to bureaucratic norms. The idea of audits of prayer-income, overbearing supervisors, board meetings devolving into chaos as gods try to smite each other—it’s delightful.

But in this book it doesn’t quite work with the cosmology of the spirit world. Because it seems that the Orisha Spirit Company has been in existence for a long time. Shigidi was created to fill a role in that company; he was literally created to be a worker drone. Since records of Shigidi predate human corporate bureaucracy, and the Orisha Spirit Company predates Shigidi, then that means that the gods decided to organize themselves according to a human cultural construct before human culture constructed it. Or, conceivably, humans got the ideas of corporate infrastructure from the gods—which is again, a delightful world-building conceit—but if so, then shouldn’t the idea of board meetings and progress reports have originated in Nigeria? (I mean, maybe they did! People with business degrees, please weigh in! But my impression is that the daily grind was imported to, not exported from, West Africa.) There are ways of making the whole corporate-gods shtick really sing, but this book doesn’t do it. It just invokes the idea as kind of a gag, and ignores all the world-building implications.

Moving on from Shigidi and his employers, let’s discuss Nneoma. As I've mentioned, she’s a succubus. I’m not a huge fan of the phenomenon of succubi (especially in the absence of incubi), because I think they’re based in a deeply misogynistic perspective that sexuality in women is inherently dangerous and bad; and also that men cannot be expected to control their sexual appetites. But I went to a panel at Worldcon in which Wole Talabi made a really interesting case for Nneoma: in the same way that Shigidi must kill people for the Orisha Spirit Company, because that was the role he was created to fill, Nneoma must kill people (through sex) because that is how she is designed to live. It’s not her fault; her deadliness to mortals is also not something she enjoys. Rather, it’s a necessity. So for different reasons, these two represent a complicated relation with mortals, in which malice and deadliness are entirely disconnected. That was neat. I was on board with that.

But this book doesn’t follow through on any of those promises. Because Nneoma, as written, absolutely loves fucking people to death, and also enjoys engendering pointless jealousy in men too, just for kicks. And, remember, Shigidi is an ugly miserable corporate drone for less than 40 pages before he gets orgasmically turned into a thirst machine and sets up as a freelancer. And even though I can’t complain about a book being super sex-oriented when one of its characters is a literal succubus, I can complain when the erotic bits are so clunkily written that they’re not even hot.

Clunkily written? Oh, yes. Let’s talk about the writing style. It’s, as I implied, clunky. For example, after descriptions of women’s nipples in a nightclub we get, ‘Shadowy people-shapes gyrated sensually against each other.’ Sensually?  Oh, good, thanks for specifying. Do the sexually attractive sexy people do sex sexily together? Or this: ‘Her flowing red dress was loose and flowed over her body’s [sic] where it encountered her curves.’ The typo I can forgive, but the repetition of ‘flowing’ and ‘flowed’ is a real clanger. (Don’t worry—it’s not all male gaze. We get lots of descriptions of Shigidi’s muscles too.)

And then there’s this approach to prepositions: ‘… the words of a man with whom he was completely in love with and for whom, in the moments when they lay together, he’d sworn he would do anything for.’

‘With whom he was in love with’? ‘For whom...he would do anything for?’ Yikes. I myself think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with preposition stranding (‘who(m) he was in love with’), but if you’re going for the more self-consciously formal pied-piping construction (‘with whom he was in love’), you’ve got to remember to leave out the final preposition. Getting smacked with that kind of sloppiness in the face, twice in quick succession, really ate up a lot of my goodwill about the writing style.

I recognize that a lot of these problems are specific to me. Writing style is an incredibly personal judgment, and if Talabi’s style works for you, then you’ll probably enjoy the eroticism as well. And although I really wanted the book to dig into the corporate commentary and the world-building, perhaps you’re on board more for the British Museum heist—which, as far as heists go, is lively and fast-paced (except for the bit where Shigidi and Nneoma pause to talk about their feelings, despite the inconveniently brief window of opportunity rapidly closing around them).  And there are some stunning images evoked in this book as scenes dissolve into other scenes.

I think this book achieves a lot of what it set out to do. But the things that it could have done and didn’t do unfortunately happened to be exactly the things that I was most interested in; and so I put it down feeling annoyed and disappointed. But that was me. Maybe you’ll be different.

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Brilliant conceit
  
• Heisting the British museum
  
• Clunky writing
  
• Full of missed opportunities to explore things that Clara, specifically, wanted to see explored
  
• Disappointingly traditional use of succubus as main character
  

Reference: Talabi, Wole. Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon [Gollancz 2023/Daw 2023].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

After surviving the worst of breakups, can you ever feel human again?

The usual list of vampire superpowers happens to match pretty well with the traits of abusive partners: they manipulate your mind, drain your lifeforce, change forms between a breathtaking charmer and a furious beast, leave you empty on the inside, and lack any reflection. They're practical devices for a writer who wants to explore the ways in which the dynamics of desire and surrender can end in disaster.

The Nebula short film Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend, written by actress and philosopher Abigail Thorn, centers on a catch-up meeting over dinner between old friends: Fay, who chose to walk away from the tumultuous elite lifestyle involved in dating the literal Dracula and being part of his multinational fashion business; and Belladonna, the new girlfriend who takes a perverse pleasure in rubbing her status in Fay's face.

Except Fay can't be shamed by Belladonna's boasting. What's really happening is that Belladonna is desperate to confirm that Fay wants what she has. But Fay is past that, no longer under Dracula's spell, and hoping to shake Belladonna out of the harmful delusion she's willingly jumped into.

The tagline for Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend is "Bit people bite people," a recognizable allusion to the common refrain in trauma therapy circles, that describes the pattern by which cycles of abuse can perpetuate themselves. Here the effects of the vampiric bite are a metaphor for the lingering hurt that a victim can carry inside and sometimes inflict on others. During the dinner, Belladonna narrates with glee her adventures drinking the blood of unsuspecting strangers. Fay responds by mentioning that she's now in a healthy relationship built on respect, which Belladonna finds horrifyingly boring.

The emotional tone of the conversation is helpfully highlighted by changes in the illumination of the scene. Since this is a conversation between vampires, it's not beyond belief that the turbulent passions deployed in their clash of viewpoints would color the air around them. However, even for a film as brief as this, multiple repetitions of the same trick of lights can get tiresome.

Where the true brilliancy of the film lies isn't in its direction, but in its razor-sharp script. Thorn uses the trappings of vampire romance to comment on the many predations we bring upon each other: if we're sufficiently poisoned by inhumanity, we can drain our fellow humans of their time, or their money, or their devotion, or their labor, or their dignity. It took a massive effort for Fay to start healing from what Dracula did to her, and it's going to be at least as difficult to make Belladonna start to see the truth of her situation.

In fact, this dinner occurs at a delicate moment in Fay's new relationship, when she's just on the verge of reproducing Dracula's behavior. While Belladonna needs what Fay has to say about knowing when to escape from a toxic partner, Fay also needs to hear herself say it before she becomes what she struggled so hard to leave behind.

There's a conversation near the end, which on a superficial level may seem unrelated to the story, but which actually summarizes its theme. Fay explains her newly acquired smoking habit by enumerating the important moments in her day that are connected to each cigarette. When put like that, it has nothing to do with Dracula. But what the script is doing here is to repackage the strangeness of a supernatural premise and translate it into terms that human viewers can relate to. Cigarettes will eventually kill you, but they feel so good right now. Just like a lover that you know isn't good for you, that you know will break you into pieces, but for whose momentary delights you keep shutting down the part of your mind that screams warnings at you.

Dracula himself doesn't even make an appearance, but his dark shadow dominates the entire plot. It's amazing how a film made of just half an hour of dialogue can contain so much meaning, so much raw intensity. This short is a slap in the face by a well-meaning friend. It's a much-needed dose of tough love. It's a blunt reminder that we can turn into our own worst enemies when we get addicted to lying to ourselves.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Meaningful messaging wrapped in predictable plotting

Decades ago, the television series The Twilight Zone presented an episode called “Eye of the Beholder” in which a disfigured woman gets a chance to have plastic surgery to become beautiful. Throughout the episode, we never fully see the faces of the characters until the very end. And, in traditional Twilight Zone form, there’s a twist in the reveal. Last year, the film Barbie gave us a thoughtful, poignant exploration of the pressure of unrealistic beauty standards that left women around the world cheering. The new Nexflix film Uglies is the latest story to tackle the concept of beauty. However, unlike its predecessors, the positive messaging in Uglies gets a bit tangled in the execution.

Uglies is based on Scott Westerfeld’s 2006 middle grade novel set in a future dystopian society where children are required to undergo cosmetic surgery to become beautiful (“Pretties”) when they turn sixteen. Until then, teens who have not yet had the surgery are called “Uglies.” Once the surgery occurs, the beautiful ones get to live in a perpetual frat party in the futuristically cool Pretty City (yes, that’s the name). How exactly does this help society? According to the backstory, the old world destroyed itself with overuse of fossil fuel, environmental pollution, and wars. Beautiful people had unfair advantages over ugly people and people had conflicts based on physical appearances. To solve this problem, everyone is made beautiful. This setup comes from the source material, but it’s confusing for appearance-based conflicts to be solved by making everyone look like the primary discriminators. Also, the racial and ethnic differences continue after the surgery, so it requires a willing suspension of disbelief to theoretically create peace by turning everyone into Balenciaga models. Of course, we eventually find out there is more to the surgery than just creating facial symmetry, and eventually the story slides into The Stepford Wives territory.

The film follows protagonist Tally Youngblood (Joey King) as she anxiously awaits her turn to become pretty while she attends the boarding school for Uglies. In flashbacks, we see her long-term, close friendship with her bestie Peris (Chase Stokes), who is a few months older than her. The two promise to remain best friends for life, and Peris promises to visit her after his surgery. However, when the story opens, Peris has been transformed and now has cut off communications with Tally. Tally engages in low-stakes shenanigans, like sneaking into New Pretty City to see him, but on a return trip she encounters a new friend: Shay (Brianne Tju), who tells her about an alternative, surgery-free community outside the city (called The Smokes), run by a mysterious leader called David. When Shay disappears, Tally gets caught up in the government’s search, led by the cruel and severe Dr. Calder (Laverne Cox), for David and the Smokes community.

Although the story has several departures from the novel, the film is entertaining in a low-stakes way. The special effects of the hover skateboarding are fun, and the visuals of the dystopian community and the gorgeous scenery of Tally’s journey to the Smokes is appealing. The acting from all the leads is solid and engaging throughout the film. The problem is the plot. There are so many incongruities that eventually they become distracting. For example, except for Peris, the appearance differences between the existing Uglies and the existing Pretties ranges from minimal to non-existent. Tally’s new bestie Shay is supermodel gorgeous despite being an “Ugly.” When Tally gets to the Smoke, outsiders David (Keith Powers) and his best friend Croy (Jan Luis Castellanos) look like they fell out of GQ. A few characters undergo the long-discussed surgery during the film. Again, with the exception of Peris, the big glow-up amounts to an anti-climactic addition of department store makeup and a quick trip to the salon for clip-ins. Anyone who understands the concept of mascara and lipliner will be rolling their eyes at the “change.” If this were a stage play, it would be understandable. But the unwillingness to take visual risks in a big-budget Netflix film is a little disappointing. The only character who stands out as particularly changed or uniquely “pretty” is Peris. Between the makeup and the special effects, he manages to look artificially chiseled, with razor-sharp cheekbones, piercing eyes, and a perpetual William Shatner in Star Trek glow about him. His visual is the best example of what creepy, out of control beauty would look like. The similarity in attractiveness between Pretties and Uglies may be an intentional choice in the film, perhaps designed to be an ironic social commentary on the relativism of beauty. If so, the premise of the story, that universal beauty eliminates societal problems, becomes irrelevant.

In addition to the lackluster visuals, the plot itself is problematic. David, who is a likeable classic hero/prophet/leader archetypal character, falls too suddenly in love with Tally, almost at first sight, and certainly too shortly after meeting her. The acting is fine, but the behavior is inconsistent with both David’s reputation as a sharp, elusive, pragmatist and with their short and relatively meaningless relationship. Tally’s character is also inconsistent. She is initially presented as inquisitive, rebellious, and fierce, but she is simultaneously whiny, cowardly, and indecisive. Teen emotions are complicated, but by the end of the film it was hard to take her character seriously. Joey King’s acting is solid and appealing, but some of the cliché lines she is forced to recite were eyeroll-worthy.

If you are expecting a Barbie-esque discourse into the superficiality of societal standards, or commentary on racism and sexism, this is not that film. Uglies is a traditional middle grade/YA dystopian adventure where the grown-ups are bad, besties betray you, the rebel-boy is boyfriend material, and in the end, you finally find your true self. Depending on what you are in the mood for, this may be the perfect low-stress film for you.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

Highlights

• Appealing actors
• Incongruous plot and visuals
• Perfectly fine background entertainment

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

The Dead God’s Heart (Spring’s Arcana) duology by Lilith Saintcrow conclues, as the daughter of a Goddess of Spring comes face to face with her own destiny and her mother’s dark desires

Nat Drozdova has come far from the little house in Queens she lived in with her ailing mother and her uncle. Sheltered all her life, dropped into a world of very American (and not so American) Gods, she’s more than halfway crossed the country on a quest to retrieve the magical artifact that might save her mother’s life... and kill her in the process. With a God of Thieves as her traveling companion, Nat’s journey continues as she comes to terms with what her mother truly wants... and what she wants, to say nothing of the other Powers very interested in the journey of the daughter of the Goddess of Spring.

The Salt-Black Tree by Lilith Saintcrow completes her story.

I covered Spring’s Arcana last year here on the blog, and if you want an introduction to the universe, I recommend you read that. Here I will confine myself to the new things, plot-, theme-, and character-wise that we get as we continue with Nat’s story.

Once again, we are mostly in Nat’s point of view, with the occasional break for a shorter chapter for Dmitri (the aforementioned God of Thieves). Having visited the Well, and gotten a piece of what she needs, their journey takes them (as you can see on the map) toward California, and much more on the quest to reunite the titular piece of Arcana. Nat goes to meet more of the Gods and Goddesses of America, all of whom show a greater and larger interest in Nat as it becomes obvious to everyone, including her, that as her Mother continues to die, and Nat gathers the Arcana, she is starting to come into her own power.

Really, the first book is a fish-out-of-water story as a very sheltered young woman learns some hard facts that the universe, her mother, and herself, are not quite what she imagined. In this novel, she has started to become more keyed into what and how things are done. There’s still a learning curve, but Nat’s evolution in this novel is more toward the very key choice she is forced to make at the titular Salt-Black Tree in Louisiana. It’s a long trip there, and not by a direct route. So, along the way, Nat runs into relatives, gets a vehicle of her own, starts to exercise her power as a Goddess of Spring to be, and much more.

Although what her mother intended for Nat was clear to the reader (if not Nat herself) in the first book, what her mother really wants becomes absolutely clear to Nat in the second book. The author is playing with powerful mythological themes and ideas, and very old ones, in the story of a Goddess of Spring wanting to hold on and rejuvenate, even if it means that her daughter must be sacrificed to do it. Given Nat’s sheltered life and the forced closeness that her mother has imposed on her, the fact that it is even a possibility that she would reject self-annihilation is a testament to the power of programming, gaslighting, and control. Everybody has family issues, and the Powers of Saintcrow’s universe are absolutely no different in that regard.

Readers who read the first book closely also will realize that Dmitri has hung over the narrative and not only as a helper, but as a threat to Nat all this time. There has been a real sense in the first book, and it is continued here in the second, that Dima (Dmitri) is protecting Nat only because he wants the heart she is seeking, and thus needs her alive... until he doesn’t. That conflict does resolve, but in a clever and paradigm-breaking way. Nat is stepping into a new world, but she isn’t (and doesn’t have to be) her mother.

Besides all that, the details on locations, minor characters, and the portrait of the United States and its Gods and Goddesses continues to be a feature. Nat gets to meet a whole variety of more Gods, pays another visit to the Hotel of the Gods known as Elysium, and gets to explore some more wonderful landscapes across the country. Although I read this in an ebook, I can imagine that if you wanted a road trip across a good stretch of the country, these two books would make fine companions, especially when interacting with real-life locations. (The town of Deadwood, in South Dakota, for example, makes an early appearance, as does Southern California, the 101 along the Pacific and more. I particularly enjoyed sections of the travel narrative that have overlapped with my own journeys and adventures. Recalling and seeing those landscapes through Nat’s eyes has been a treat. And of course the new places Nat visits just fuel and further my own endless wanderlust.

One skill Saintcrow has in her series fiction, and the Dead God’s Heart series is no exception, is to tell a complete story in such a way that I don’t feel like I need more (even given the open-ended ending), but she creates secondary characters and complete worlds that are an absolute pleasure to visit and I wouldn’t mind another book or two in this universe. Given relatively recent attention on a particular author’s behavior, I feel confident now that if I want to recommend a contemporary fantasy about deities in the modern world, instead of a certain famous book by that famous author, I would point them toward Lilith Saintcrow’s Dead God’s Heart duology. It’s dollars to donuts that the existence of the aforementioned book made these books more possible and palatable to the publisher. But you can just get in the car with Dima and Nat and take a road trip with them.

(One last note: If you look at the map at the beginning of the book, and trace the route Nat takes, pay attention to the symbol it creates. Food for thought, and a clue, too, as to theme and plot, and the ultimate fate of the protagonists.)

Highlights:

At the end of the world, art may not save us, but it will prove that our lives meant something

One morning, every human being on the planet hears a voice in their head. It's not a hallucination: it's a public service announcement. The simulation that hosts our universe will be shut down in a few weeks. Be sure to say your goodbyes. Apologies for the inconvenience.

To prevent mass chaos, the people running the simulation have dialed down our rebelliousness. They want none of that rage against the machine, thank you very much. We're expected to just go gentle into the night.

And yet, one man will spend his last days ensuring that his brief stay among the living will leave a mark. Our protagonist, Marshall, is a complete nobody. But in the face of eternal oblivion, that's what we all are. Regardless of his complete lack of talent, friends, or any redeeming qualities, he will stop at nothing to finally make the movie he left unfinished years ago. It's not a good movie, not even a good concept. But it's his movie. That it matters to him is enough. That hopeless scream against the void is the premise of the indie film The Last Movie Ever Made.

Now, to be clear, the fact that you're making sincere art doesn't automatically mark you as a good person. Marshall has learned the same narcissism he criticizes in his mother, and the way he gathers his moviemaking crew exposes the faults of character that have left his life stranded and directionless. He does acquire a more mature perspective about himself during the runtime of the film, but it's still an indictment of his person that it took the end of the world for him to begin that process.

Art is meant to be useless, if you go by Oscar Wilde's word. Nothing will change because of Marshall's movie existing. It won't convince the makers of the simulation to keep us alive. It won't buy our reality even one more day. When everything ends, so will art. So why bother?

The Last Movie Ever Made rejects that question. Its position is that it's precisely because we are limited and ephemeral that art is worth the effort. In fact, our finitude is what makes art valuable. It doesn't even matter that the beauty we create is doomed to fade away. It suffices to elevate the universe, to be a place where beauty once existed, as opposed to one that never had it.

It's a pity that the script doesn't maintain a firmer grasp of its own theme. The character of Marshall lacks consistency from one act to the next because the plot requires his immediate world to warp itself around his goals: one day, his ex-wife is angry at him for caring more about finishing his movie than about her recent family tragedy; a few days later, she happily stays for his sake and dismisses whatever her family supposedly meant to her. This muddles the film's earlier point about the lines that Marshall has crossed for his art. It's as if the fact that everyone will soon die rendered moot any consequences for repeated misbehavior on Marshall's part.

The film is made with almost the same simplicity with which Marshall makes his. The characters' situation already carries enough emotion without any need to punctuate it with fancy camera tricks, digital effects, or even a relevant soundtrack. This is a bare-bones production whose only ambition is to say what it means, and it succeeds at that.

In a possible parallel with the larger premise about a computer program coming to an end, the film's third act begins when Marshall's computer crashes and most of the scenes he's shot are lost. At that point in the story, it appears that his entire life's work has been for nothing. Even if he were to start again, he may not have enough time before the universe is shut down. There you have the human condition in a nutshell: We never know whether it makes sense to try, because none of us is promised there will be enough time.

So what does Marshall do? He tries again. Of course he tries again. Because that's what humans do when confronted with the absurd. Because, although no human effort can destroy death, art is the one human effort that death can't destroy.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

In order to sculpt yourself into your ideal form, how much are you willing to chip away?

For The Substance's lead role, a 50-year-old performer desperate to stay afloat in the ruthlessly sexist job market of show business, Demi Moore was the perfect casting choice, not only because of the parallels with real life (Moore's career has veered away from the dazzling spotlight she enjoyed in the '90s), but also because of the implicit irony in the fact that it takes a 60-year-old actress to portray Hollywood's idea of 50. To be clear, Moore is an exceptionally attractive 60-year-old, and her character's arc is valuable for reminding those of us of the homelier persuasion that not even a renowned star gifted with her breathtaking caliber of beauty is immune to the image insecurities that the patriarchy imposes on us all.

The Substance tells the story of Elisabeth, an Oscar-winning actress whose fame has faded over the years, a transition that the film represents with a brilliantly designed time-lapse of her slowly eroding star on the Walk of Fame. She hosts a morning fitness show à la Cindy Crawford, until she's fired by a pervy studio executive (played in gaudy extravagance by Dennis Quaid) who wants a younger face on the screen. In shock over the sudden news, Elisabeth gets distracted while driving and has a serious accident that she somehow survives unharmed. Here's where a certain strain of film criticism would propose the reading that Elisabeth actually dies in the accident and everything we see from that point on is her torment in the afterlife. I'm not a fan of that type of interpretation, because I find it facile and unconstructive, but in this case it may as well be true: what Elisabeth goes through after the accident is, in every sense, hell.

Before leaving the hospital, Elisabeth is approached by a suspiciously good-looking nurse who leads her to a clandestine treatment that promises to turn people into their best versions—and to make sure there's no confusion, here "best" means "pretty." The eponymous Substance is an injection that triggers cellular division at the most literal level: Elisabeth's body contorts and warps until it rips itself open, letting a young, stunning, smooth-skinned, perfectly shaped woman step out. This scene is painstaking in its deliberate gruesomeness, and it reminded me of the no less horrifying violence involved in real beauty treatments. Think for a moment about the butchering of the human form that routinely goes on in a plastic surgery clinic, and the idea of pushing an entire adult body out of your spine doesn't sound so far-fetched.

According to the instruction manual, the younger body can only survive for one week, sustained by daily injections extracted from the older body. Then the patient must switch back to inhabiting the older body for the next week, and the cycle restarts. So Elisabeth must alternate her life with her other self, who goes by the name Sue. Under this fresher, livelier persona, it takes no effort for the jaw-droppingly gorgeous Sue to get hired to replace Elisabeth as the new fitness instructor on TV and, while she's at it, to embark on a meteoric modeling career that puts her on every billboard and magazine cover. As Sue, Elisabeth can vicariously receive the adoration and popularity that she misses from her glory days, but the younger body still depends on the older one to stay alive. As long as she follows the instructions, nothing should go wrong. The complications arise when Sue gets a little too ambitious and starts trying to push Elisabeth out of the way.

All through the movie, we're reminded that Elisabeth and Sue are one person. The escalating insults, lesions and betrayals they inflict on each other are really self-insults, self-lesions, self-betrayals. This is the cleverest trick in The Substance: it takes the hidden toil of self-hatred that underlies extreme beauty regimens and makes it explicit.

The Substance wastes no time in making it clear that it has no interest in subtlety. Moviegoers are already aware of the economic and social subjugation of women by means of impossible beauty standards, and even the ghastly ordeal that Elisabeth endures in her quest to be valued again is only a few degrees removed from reality. A core component of this injustice, besides the basic sexism, is the distorting effect of fame: after decades in the spotlight, Elisabeth's psyche is at a state where she must earn nothing less than the fanatical adoration of the masses in order to fulfill the minimal human need of feeling respected.

In accordance with the intensity of stimulus that Elisabeth requires, The Substance is an unforgiving assault on the viewer's senses. The screen bursts wide with a parade of open wounds, rotten tissue, vomit, needles, guts, creaky joints, loose teeth, and assorted bodily fluids, each matched with the corresponding sound effect. The foley team had the daunting task to come up with a whole palette of variations on "squelch": we hear flesh being pierced, torn, stretched, crushed, munched on. The experience of watching The Substance is designed to bring the viewer as close as possible to suffering the same punishment Elisabeth goes through.

One can think of The Substance as an abomination stitched together from stolen organs: take the first act of Death Becomes Her, the second act of The Nutty Professor, and the third act of The Fly, paint it over with an emotional tone distilled from the psychological disintegration of Black Swan, and set it all on fire with the climax of Carrie. To sit down for this film is to gorge on a banquet of flaky skin and brittle bones and dripping pus. Once Elisabeth is at open war with Sue, the gore factor only goes higher and higher, and when you think the film has reached the edge of gruesome imagery it can dare to produce, it shatters that edge with the strength of interminable torrents of blood. You will only make it to the end of this film by being dragged into it as an unwilling officiant in its profane rite, because the tyranny of glamour and celebrity knows no limit with regard to the parts of humanity that it demands in sacrifice.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

The first Star Wars open world video game is a beautifully designed treat for fans by developers that clearly love the universe, but the gameplay leaves a little to be desired. (Spoiler free)

As a long-time Star Wars gaming lover, I've been waiting for an open-world video game. Hell, I even bought a PlayStation 5 in anticipation of this release, putting my long-suffering PS4 to rest finally. And I enjoyed it! I did my first playthrough in about 25 hours, completing the main storyline. I've since restarted, and am giving myself time to really relax into the game. Like in many open worlds (I'm a huge fan of Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Fallout 4), it takes time to learn, explore, and discover everything a game offers. And to be clear, Outlaws offers a lot—you just have to be willing to work for it.

The setup

You're Kay Vess, a loner thief from the gambling capital of the Empire, Canto Bight. After a job gone wrong, you're on the lam in a stolen space shuttle called the Trailblazer, and tagging along with you is your trusty sidekick, Nix, a creature that's like a cross between an axolotl and a cat. No matter anyone's take on this game, good or bad, they love Nix. We all love Nix. Nix is a damn saint.

He rides shotgun with you on your speeder, can grab weapons and pickpocket for you, push buttons behind energy shields to lower them, and any of a dozen other useful features throughout the game. He's not unlike the little droid companion in Jedi: Fallen Order.

Together, you land on the planet Toshara, where you fall in with a man name Jaylen Vrax, who's putting together a crew for a one-last-time kind of heist against a crimelord named Sliro. The first half of the game is gathering all of the different members (the muscle, the bomb expert, etc.) while the second concerns the actual pull-off of the heist itself. Think a Star Wars Ocean's 11, and you're close.

Throughout the game, you have tons of side quests on the various planets and moons: Cantonica, Toshara, Tatooine, Akiva, and Kijimi. Because you're dealing with all of the underworld elements and crime syndicates, you have the ability to get in good—or piss off—factions like Zerek Besh, the Hutts, Crimson Dawn, and more. There's lots of double-crossing and backstabbing, which makes for a fun, if at times complicated, story.

The gameplay

The first thing any Outlaws player will want to discuss—or hate on—is stealth. This game is not a shooter or a button masher; it's a stealth game. For those not expecting this, it can be kind of frustrating. But I keep coming back to a comment I saw on Reddit explaining this: you're a skinny sneak from Canto Bight, not a warrior or stormtrooper with small arms training. Once I really let that sink in, my perspective changed.

Kay has lots of Imperial compounds and gang-dens to infiltrate, and the stealth gameplay often requires you to not trigger alarms while sneaking around. Once you do, the level restarts, which can be annoying. Much has been said about the AI NPCs being inconsistent in terms of difficulty, but honestly I found several parts to be super challenging.

As a sneak, you have to do lots of slicing (the Star Wars word for hacking) and breaking into buildings. Slicing in this game is basically like playing Star Wars number Wordle: you have to rearrange numbers into the correct order. No real skill is required for this, and it gets repetitive pretty quick. The other way you gain access to doors is with your data spike, which you use by syncing up flashing lights to a trigger. Again, not terribly complicated, but I always liked these breaks in the game.

When you're not sneaking and shooting, there's lots of other activities to keep you busy on the planets. Flying into space is fun, and the space battles are entertaining, not unlike in Star Wars Squadrons.

Traveling in between the planets through hyperspace and approaching them reminds me of Mass Effect. Even in the vastness of space, there's so many little nuances that showcase the developers of Star Wars. When you jump to hyperspace, for example, you move both the joysticks forward simultaneously—you're truly "punching it" as Han would say.

There's also a very a robust Sabacc card game simulator that you can play frequently, and it's surprisingly fun and engaging. Sometimes I'd find myself just settling in for 30 minutes to play this card game with aliens and loving every second.

Spending time in our favorite universe

Honestly, a non-Star Wars fanatic probably won't love this game. The gameplay and story just isn't enough to really impress someone immensely. But if you do love Star Wars, and the thought of just roaming around the Jundland Wastes on your speeder bike appeals to you, you're in for a treat.

The maps are SO comprehensive and detailed, and it's clear that these developers put a lot of love into this game. Here are just a few of the little moments of joy (thanks to some breathtaking graphics) that made me smile—and keep making me smile, as I'm now 40 hours into this game and have no intention of stopping soon:

Petting a bantha at dusk outside Mos Eisley

Checking out a gonk droid sale on Toshara

Winning a game of Sabacc against a Rodian and two humans

Hanging out with some Jawas at night on Tatooine

If these things appeal to you, you'll probably enjoy this game. I wasn't blown away when I rushed through just the main storyline, but as I slow down and take my time, exploring every little bit because I'm a Star Wars super fan, I'm really loving it.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

A deeply atmospheric tale set amidst the Cornish moors of the 18th century

Some books are heavy on plot, some on worldbuilding, some on character, some on vibe. Gorse, the debut novel of Cornish author Sam K. Horton, leads instead with atmosphere, and a sense of place so sharp it cuts.

Set in a small village in the moors in the late 18th century, this is a story that could be nowhere else but Cornwall. Every part of it, every word, every plant, every folkloric motif draws from its location, whether real or invented. It is a story full of flowers, trees and bogs, of smells on the air and weather, of sensation. Even after only a few pages it is a story that has deeply, thoroughly immersed you in its location, because that's where its magic is, and comes from... both in a metaphorical sense and a rather more literal one.

We follow Pel, the Keeper of the High Moor, a man charged with maintaining balance between the human world and the unseen world of the fey, along with his partially estranged ward Nancy. They both can see the spirits, sprites and fairies that infest the countryside, giving help and harm to the people around them, while remaining invisible to nearly all. They mediate, give charms and spells to those in need, bind things that threaten, and work to keep the world ticking over and in good order. But there are murders happening, sinister deaths that leave a burnt handprint on the victims' neck, and the vicar is starting to cast blame at those who he claims believe in devils. Tensions are high, and more and more people turn from the old traditions towards the church. The balance is no longer being maintained, and Pel's pride, his wounded ego, are holding him back from offering the help the village sorely needs. We watch as events unfold, as a promise of doom begins to build like storm clouds over this community, and the events that ensue.

Much like the sense of place, a lingering feeling of doom building up suffuses every page. It becomes very quickly apparent that Gorse is not a cheery novel, and that it takes its mode of fantasy from the old sort of folkloric tales, replete with death and vengeance, and bloody prices and sacrifices required for what is owed. This is not a story that glamorises magic, or the people who practice it, nor is it one where its magic can be systemised and categorised—there is nothing of D&D in this fantasy, only the raw stuff of old legends, where the logic of intuitive sense holds sway. It is a story about grim survival in the face of horrifying things, of forces beyond control except by those willing to pay the price. But it is also, very deeply, a story about people, and about a war between two ways of seeing the world, one that will allow peaceful co-existence, and another that demands no path but its own.

And that it does immensely well—the mythic quality of it all shines through on every page, and maintains a remarkably clear atmosphere throughout. But there is a catch to it. With that palpable doom, with the elevated tone of the mythic, comes distance. Horton's prose keeps its characters at arm's length, even when we are deeply invested in their point of view, in their feelings about a situation. We watch someone go through awful grief, and yet that grief fails to touch us, because the story always keeps us outside of the situation: an observer, not a passenger. It's a double-edged sword. Without this feeling of distance, without the dispassionate narrative voice, the story simply would not have the folkloric vibes it so painstakingly maintains. But that choice comes at a cost, and it is felt most painfully in moments of intense character emotion. It seems, in this story at least, you cannot have both.

And it is a shame, because both Nancy and Pel, as close as we get to them, are incredibly compelling characters to watch. They both have their burdens, their angers and their passions, and we see both of them go through some really quite emotive situations. But where another writer—a Guy Gavriel Kay, for instance—could twist this into sorrow that genuinely provokes tears, Horton never quite manages to stick the knife in, emotionally speaking, and it feels like a story that would merit it and feel the better for it. Sometimes, you—or at least I—like a good sweet sorrow type of story, where the sadness is so exquisitely crafted it is transformed into something wonderful and nearly addictive. There are moments here where I desperately wanted that. I saw a character reach that point, but because I felt kept outside of their mind, outside of their experience, I could never quite connect enough to them and what they were going through, what they were feeling, for the sorrow to hit just right. For Nancy, this means seeing someone—someone whose determination and goodness make her very easy to like—go through tragedy, heartbreak and rage, and not feel quite connected to it. Sad, frustrating, but still an arc whose narrative beats make sense to us, show us what sort of story it is. For Pel the struggle is greater, because he is such an interesting and difficult character. We spend much of the story watching his ego, his need for control, and his superiority get in the way of him making the right decisions, or indeed meaning he feels that he's the only one who can make those decisions, even when they impact the people around him. He's frankly insufferable at times, and it is very easy to sympathise with Nancy's irritation and fights with him. But we get glimmers, especially in moments of interaction with her, that there's a lot more going on under the surface with him. And because we are denied access to the fullness of his interiority, we are likewise denied an emotional connection to what drives him to be as he is, which makes the character so much less. I wanted, at so many points, to like him. We can see he is trying to do good, to help the world, to do his duty. But he gets himself in the way of his solutions so often that it would be rewarding to have access to the emotional narrative that drives all of that. As I say, we get glimmers. There are little moments that do give us pieces of it. It's enough that you know it's there. But just not quite enough to sink your teeth into.

There is, too, an issue with the tone of the book. The sense of incoming doom mentioned above is constant, from very early on, and it is increasingly easy to become numb to it. There's no narrative respite, so our capacity to appreciate the doom lessens as we grow accustomed. Had there been brief interludes—and they would only need to be brief—I think I would have appreciated that cold sense of impending disaster all the more, because it would keep biting me afresh.

But... both of these, problems though they might be, are also fitting. That doom, that detached tone, all feed into a coldness in the novel that is so absolutely fitting to both the story it is trying to tell and the place it is trying to evoke. Everything here comes back to place. You cannot escape it. To read it is to feel the chill of the wind and the rain, and I was intensely glad this was an autumn release, one I read just as the temperature here in the UK is taking a dip into chill, and I could hold a cup of tea close for comfort while reading. The brittle wintriness of the landscape of the Cornish moor escapes off the page and into the reader with ease.

And so too the folklore. Some of the aspects of the story were familiar to me—the giants Gog and Magog loom large (wahey) over English tales beyond just Cornwall, but some were either entirely new or close but not exactly the thing that I knew from my own upbringing elsewhere in England. At one point, Nancy sings:

See-saw, Margery Daw,

And here, I think, I know this one. But then she follows it with:

Sold her bed and lay on the straw.
Sold her bed and lay upon hay.
And Pisky came and carried her away.

Whereas the rhyme in my memory has her receiving only a penny a day for the slow speed of her work. But this is the traditional Cornish version, apparently. It is not English folklore, because folklore like this cannot be genericised in that way. It is tied to a place, and a place as experienced by one person, or one community, and it is the greatest strength of the story—this understanding that the magical and the mythic can be so intimately bound up in the living world, and thus to the particularities of a place.

We see occasional intrusions of myth from outside—though there are no coasts or mines on the moor here, buccas and spriggans visit—but those externalities are consciously rebuffed in favour of the people and magics of this place. Which is not to say it's a story where only those of a particular location are able to enact its magic, which is a less pleasant direction these types of stories can sometimes go in. Pel, we are told, journeyed here from elsewhere and became the Keeper because it was the way he could prove himself the best at what he did. People, it seems, do not need to be tied to their locations, just the magic—it is enough to know it, to make yourself familiar with it, in order to be able to wield it. I have more time for this as a thesis on folkloric magic. He brought some of where he came from with him, but blended it with the place he came, and so, even in a story that is so utterly rooted in a singular location, there is an understanding that these types of stories, these mythologies, have always been as transitory as the people who tell them.

Ultimately, I found it a successful book. I was willing to be carried away, to see with clear eyes a moor covered in gorse and heather, dotted with tors and the dangers of bog and marsh. I wanted to feel its wind and rain, and be a little afraid of its dangers along with the characters. And it achieves that atmosphere absolutely perfectly. Where it suffers is in the closer, more human work, and I am, ultimately, willing to forgive it that (even though it's often the thing I care most about in stories) because its delivery of atmosphere, of this bottling of a place and time, is so exquisite and unusual in its intensity. I don't think I've read anything quite like it in a number of years. It brings to mind perhaps, most clearly, Sarah Perry's work—the creeping winter chill of Melmoth or the open bleakness of The Essex Serpent. The landscape is different, but some of the intent is the same. And all three are books best savoured in the cold weather, with something warm to comfort you from them.

Highlights: atmosphere in heaps and spades, sadness and doom, intimate folklore and feeling of a specific place and time

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Horton, Sam K. Gorse [Solaris, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Hanuvar’s story continues as he meets new allies, enemies, and challenges