Mario Bava's gothic classic is a masterclass in designing and executing absolutely top-shelf spooky vibes

Italian horror is hit or miss with me. I know it's essential to the genre, but the '70s stuff—even Suspiria—just doesn't do it for me. But then in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Lydia Deetz's daughter, Astrid, states that Kill, Baby, Kill is her favorite horror movie. Of course, this is just Tim Burton spreading the gospel of his favorite filmmakers (which is awesome; the youth need to expand their spooky horizons).

But I took it as a sign to head back to Italy for some frights. Kill, Baby, Kill centers on a small town in the Carpathian mountains that is experiencing a rash of unexplained deaths. A doctor is sent to investigate the goings-on, and accompanied by a local medical student, tries to debunk what he fervently believes is just small-town superstition. The townsfolk, on the other hand, are sure that the spirit of a dead girl named Melissa is spurring people to kill themselves.

The plot isn't exactly groundbreaking, but in 1966 the "evil children" genre wasn't in full force quite yet, so it may have been more exciting back then.

What Kill, Baby, Kill does do well is absolutely immaculate production design and overall feeling. It has the vibe of Hammer horror films combined with the strangely formal feeling of a theatrical play.

Nearly every scene could be a frame-worthy spooky still. If you're looking for long, dark shadows that fall down staircases, grubby gravediggers in fog-laden cemeteries, and cobwebs encircling archaic sconces, this film's got you covered in spades. It could almost be one of the "Spooky Ambience — 10 Hour" channels you find on YouTube and leave on the TV during a Halloween party.

The version I found was dubbed in English, which makes it a little harder to evoke as much as spook, but one thing I really liked was the amount of female characters in this—from the local town witch, Ruth (who, oh my God, would Aubrey Plaza play the hell out of in a modern remake) to the hauntingly white spirit of 7-year-old Melissa, the ghost at the center of it all. It's also cool how Bava turns traditional color symbology on its head, using white for evil and black for the force of good.

Overall, not scary but fun to vibe to on a cool, dark fall night. Bonus points for the haunted dolls scattered throughout.

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.

The one with the excess of close-ups and the perpetually constipated grimace

Ideally, Jack Palance should have been a great choice for the role of Count Dracula. His suitability for the role was so widely acknowledged that Marvel Comics used his likeness for the series Tomb of Dracula years before Dan Curtis cast him in the role. This was the same Dan Curtis who created the TV series Dark Shadows. Add Richard I Am Legend Matheson writing the script, and this movie had the right pedigree to be spectacular. Unfortunately, someone must have given Palance the wrong acting instructions, because from the start to the end of the movie, he only knows how to make one face: that of the unlucky vampire who forgot to add some fiber to his all-blood diet, and is now in urgent need of a laxative.

It's not like Palance is wasted on the role. When he speaks, you believe that he's the right actor. He says his lines in an unnervingly calm, low voice, in the tone of an immortal who has seen everything and can no longer be surprised. His acting choices resemble those of Bela Lugosi in his manner of staring, standing, and carrying himself. However, where Lugosi could own a scene by raising an eyebrow, Palance invariably contorts every muscle on his face, as if the director were pressuring him to choose which emotion to show.

The director himself is no help on this matter, with his strange habit of resorting to a zoom-in to mark every emotional beat. He does make effective use of low angles and the occasional Dutch angle to underline a character's interaction with the realm of the occult, but his overreliance on close-ups becomes a form of self-sabotage against the serious tone he's clearly going for. Matheson's script keeps a tight rein on the pacing of events, an essential skill to have when the audience already knows the plot by heart, and the directing style falls short of what this script deserves.

This time, the reshuffling of characters is less drastic than in previous adaptations, but there's one key detail to pay attention to: the addition of the subplot about the Count's long-dead wife whose likeness he randomly encounters in the present. Coppola would use the same subplot in his 1992 version. This is another way of solving the eternal question about the Count's reason for moving to England: in this case, it's because he's a hopeless romantic. From his dialogues (and bizarrely melodramatic flashbacks) it can be inferred that he'd be happy to remain in his castle if it weren't for the armies that have continuously come to pillage his land and/or murder his wife. If you will just let him keep his wife, he won't have to come to kill you. This version of the Count is no less a seducer than previous ones, but here the story emphasizes his sexual needs instead of Lucy's or Mina's. In fact, the female characters in this version perform the function of hypnotizable MacGuffins rather than people. They're there for the Count to pursue and for Arthur and Van Helsing to chivalrously defend.

It's funny how the space left open by removing Jonathan Harker from the action in London raises Arthur Holmwood to an almost protagonistic position, yet the script keeps him restricted to serving as an appendix of Dr. Van Helsing. They do everything together, go everywhere together, investigate each clue together—you could remove Arthur from this movie and the only change you'd notice would be that Van Helsing would have to recite his infodumps to himself. Even Mina is almost an afterthought: her close friendship with Lucy is more told than shown, and what little autonomy she has in the plot is gone once she's fed Dracula's blood.

Changing Count Dracula from a predator to a heartbroken widower isn't enough to arouse sympathy for this character. There are still good reasons why the common folk who live near his castle shudder at his name. And on a more pragmatic level, the rough, hyperangular features of Jack Palance's face are a bad fit for a romantic lead. But the movie wants to present the Count as a suffering, tragic man who has endured loneliness for too long and just hopes for a second chance at happiness. Again, this is the same angle Coppola would try some years later, but Coppola succeeds at it because his Dracula is legible to us, because his flashback actually does the job of explaining the part of the story we need to understand instead of giving us mere hints as in this movie.

Dracula's manner of death in this version is overacted as all hell. Once the curtains are ripped open to let the sunlight in, the Count staggers and pauses multiple times to make sure you see him pose in pain from all sides. Then he helpfully gets himself in position for Van Helsing to impale him, a process that takes way more camera cuts than it needs. Overall, this movie is not without enjoyable moments, if your idea of enjoyment allows for frequent, abrupt shifts in PoV and a plot structured like a game of cat and mouse.

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

The one that was color-graded with extreme prejudice

With this being the fourth Dracula adaptation I watch for this series, I start to wonder: is it humanly possible to tell a Dracula story where women actually make choices of their own? Even in this unabashedly horny version, directed by John Badham, Lucy's vehement wish to spent eternity with the Count can be attributed to magical coercion. It's as if there were no such thing as freely desiring your predator; with Dracula there must always be a pinch of deception thrown in the mix, a hidden hand pushing the will that believes itself free. Where human seduction depends on mutual offering and suggesting, vampiric seduction is all about control. The trick is to hide that control under a charming façade, to convince you that your surrender was your own idea. The vampire is one of those predator species that prefer a docile prey. Like an anglerfish, but hot.

The trope of the vampire as a sexual threat has been present since the very earliest vampire fiction: both Polidori's The Vampyre and Le Fanu's Carmilla revolve around serial seducers of unsuspecting maidens. It became a perennial trait in fiction even until the early years of the 21st century to handle the topic of desire with a certain deliberate ambiguity where vampires were involved. Those stories look very different now through the lens of our contemporary notion of consent: for us, upholders of bodily autonomy and personal agency, any degree of coercion is unacceptable, no matter how sugarcoated. And it's a sign of the progress we've made that the authors of classic vampire tales would have found our perspective odd, maybe too reductive. So if you're going to dive into the literary tradition of sexy vampires, you need to keep in mind two conflicting stances: that of today, according to which anything less than free consent is inarguably assault; and that of the authors, whose understanding of seduction was most likely less egalitarian.

Badham casts a handsome Dracula, removing part of the character's mystique. While it makes the movie's romantic storyline more digestible to the audience, I find that it alters the character too much. Dracula is supposed to be a master manipulator; a key component of his scare factor is that, even if he presented himself in public like the stinking, rotten corpse he actually is, his victims would still be incapable of resisting his embrace. Dracula pulls the strings of human desire in the service of his own desire, which is what makes Nosferatu so effective. If Dracula is good-looking, it doesn't strike us as horrifying that someone would desire him—even if he's using his mind control powers. With the air of effortless charm that Frank Langella gives to this character, it's entirely believable that someone would want to be possessed by him—even if he's not using his mind control powers.

Here your mileage may vary. For a segment of the audience, the fact that he's already attractive before he starts controlling you will make him feel more dangerous. In my case, I'm fascinated by the idea of an inhuman monstrosity that can nonetheless reach into your most intimate feelings and twist them against you. And here we need to invoke cultural attitudes around lookism. By making Dracula handsome, this movie joins the long tradition of folk tales that question the idea of a link between external and internal beauty. Think of the Greek siren, or the medieval succubus, or the Japanese jorōgumo: extremely beautiful, equally evil.

For this version of Dracula, the reshuffling of characters goes like this: Jonathan is engaged to Lucy, who is the daughter of Dr. Seward. There's no Arthur, no brides of Dracula, no earlier visit by Renfield, and no ruse from Dracula: he readily admits that he's visiting England as a consumer. Of more consequence is the rewrite that turns Mina into Dr. Van Helsing's daughter. This time, he isn't an established vampire hunter; he learns about vampires along with the audience. This change allows for a scenario I like to see: Dracula infiltrating human society. Langella plays the Count as a worldly hedonist who enraptures people with his vast talent for conversation. Instead of keeping to the formalities of high society, like Lugosi's Count, Langella's is almost scandalous in how openly he seeks and enjoys female attention.

Thick volumes could be written on the Freudian symbolism of the vampire as a dual object of the erotic impulse and the death impulse, on the alarmingly easy way our basic desires can be warped toward our own destruction. Badham's Dracula aims to present a believable scenario of such distorted passions. Much like desire itself, your response to this piece of art will be uniquely yours. Maybe you'll fall under the spell. Maybe you'll remain unmoved. Taste is a mystery, like life and death.

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

A groundbreaking vampire film, tangled with misogyny and old-school monster melodrama

Vampire horror is not my favorite genre, so I generally avoid most of it. My most positive experiences with vampire fiction consist of an ill-advised beach vacation reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (which I found surprisingly creepy and enjoyable); Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters book series (Magnus, Raphael, and Simon are all very different but likeable vampires); Twilight, which I found reasonably entertaining and, at least, not offensive; and the first season (British version) of Being Human, a slice-of-life story of a ghost, werewolf, and vampire trying to live a normal life in modern-day London. (I will also admit to watching Kate Beckinsale in Underworld more than once.) Beyond those diversions, I generally skip contemporary vampire content since a common premise is often alpha males hedonistically and cruelly murdering innocent people (usually women) to satiate an internal need. So, I unapologetically avoided the original 1994 Interview With the Vampire until this October’s First Scare project.

I remember the arrival of this film in theaters and the resulting rebirth of vampire trendiness. The stars of the film were the then super beautiful Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Antonio Banderas (who I forgot was in this story). My college bestie loved the Anne Rice novels and, although I never read them, I understood the movie had several departures from the books. However, despite the traditional appeal of the sexy vampire trope, the film ultimately felt intensely misogynous—primarily violence by men against women, which is ironic since the source material is written by a woman. I know this film is a favorite for many, so I will just say… it’s not for me.

The story begins in the present (1994), with the eternally young vampire, Louis (Brad Pitt) telling the story of his life to a skeptical newspaper reporter (Christian Slater). Then we move to the flashback. Our protagonist Louis is a 1700s slave plantation owner in Louisiana. So, yes, any possible sympathy from me went out the window. His wife and baby have recently died so he’s depressed and making poor choices (nihilistically carousing, etc., because he wants to die due to his grief). Along comes Lestat (Tom Cruise), a blonde, French vampire hanging out in Louisiana. He offers Louis a variation of death: vampirism, to which Louis agrees. Again, no sympathy. After he becomes a vampire, Louis has some buyer’s remorse and is a bit disturbed at having to drink the blood of living creatures / humans (killing them) to live. Lestat has no such concerns and kills (mostly women) indiscriminately. Louis shows his moral outrage by initially mostly drinking rats’ blood, which Lestat eyerolls. However, Louis has no problems killing his Black female slave (Thandie Newton), especially after she says, “you haven’t come by the slave quarters lately.” Ugh. When Louis hands the dead woman back to the rest of his slaves, he laments that he’s a bad person. At this point I was definitely ready to stop watching. Then he randomly tells them to leave (they’re “free”). I mean, it’s the 1700s in the American South. They’re obviously not free. He can’t even be bothered to write an official document for them.

Later, during a plague epidemic in New Orleans, Louis finds a little girl (Kirsten Dunst), with her dead mother, and vampire-kills the child. Presumably, he thinks she has the plague too and is doomed anyway. Unclear. However, Lestat turns the child, Claudia, into a vampire so that she can be a companion for the always brooding / whining Louis. The three become a creepy family until little (one hundred year old) Claudia has had enough of Lestat’s controlling behavior and decides to put an end to him. Then the story shifts gears to true, epic violence.

I was surprised by how dated the actual, physical film looked and how dated the acting was. Lestat and later the European vampire king, Armand (Antonio Banderas), are so melodramatic as the alpha vampires that I struggled to take them seriously, despite the carnage. Louis is angsty, but simultaneously complicit in killing, in a way that becomes annoying. The second half of the film mostly consists of women being murdered while begging for their lives in some sort of sexualized context. Again, not for me.

Kirsten Dunst’s Claudia is the main bright spot in the story. She is wonderfully sharp-tongued, creepy, feral, and intense, and she is the only bit of girl-power in this story. Louis’s big revenge scene is somewhat satisfying, as is an earlier moment when Lestat goes monster-y feral after being set on fire. Other than that, this classic film is not one I’ll be watching on repeat. I can see why AMC thought a remake was needed. Apparently, I prefer my fictional vampires to be more grounded. I also, admittedly, prefer stories with at least one sympathetic protagonist. This film has none. In Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, there is at least a team of heroes trying to stop the killing. In Shadowhunters, there are vampire heroes and vampire villains, and meaningful discussions of the label of “downworlders.” Those stories are all more to my taste. But I appreciate Interview With the Vampire for its role in reimagining the vampire genre, taking it from monstrously alien to familiarly human, with all its flaws and moral questioning. In doing so, it opened the doors to a range of new interpretations, including many that I quite enjoy.

Highlights

• Another film carried by the child actor
• Problematic misogyny
• A groundbreaking change of pace for the vampire genre

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

A house that hides much worse than skeletons in its closet

My most persistent thought during the runtime of Poltergeist was about how much of this movie's DNA can be recognized in Stranger Things. The tropes of nightmarish suburbia, a childhood immersed in pop culture, electric devices as a conduit to the paranormal, a child trapped within the walls of a house, and a danger too big for parents to protect against are elements that the Netflix show clearly inherits from this '80s classic. I wasn't so much scared as amused by its visual effects, at times reminiscent of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which in my book is not a good sign. When it aims for spooky, it overshoots and lands on goofy. I admit that in my childhood this movie would have terrorized the hell out of me, but watching it now leaves me with an impression similar to live-action Scooby-Doo. I suspect this is a recurring trait in the Spielberg-Lucas axis of storytelling: if it doesn't hook you when you're young, it never will.

Poltergeist feels like a condensation of mystical currents of thought that had gained strength during the hippie era but really date back to the spiritualist fad of the 19th century. Advances in the understanding of electromagnetism coincided with a growing interest in the inner workings of the mind, and it was only natural that a theory eventually formed linking electromagnetism with the paranormal. If you didn't know any better, it made some sort of sense: if you consider radio waves, they're an invisible force that exists all around us and can even pass through us, and have very tangible effects if you have a properly sensitive machine at hand. So it wasn't too much of a stretch to suppose that ghosts worked the same way. Poltergeist is an heir to over a century of superstition that viewed in electrical devices a viable tool for contacting the spiritual realm.

But Poltergeist does more than that. It also takes advantage of the moral panic that was forming around mass media and the way the TV set ended up altering not only the inner dynamics of the American family, but also the rhythm of daily life. People in Poltergeist time their activities by the programming schedule of TV; their day ends when the last broadcast ends. Even before malevolent spirits jump out of the screen, they're already under the spell of TV.

Putting spirits in the TV suggests an unspoken pun, as a riff on Marshall McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message." The movie plays with a medium (as in channel of communication) but also with a medium (as in speaker with the dead), and by blurring the difference between the technological and the mystical, it opens space for a new discursive position, one that treats electronic media as another battlefield between good and evil. Instead of a mindless machine, the TV set becomes a subject of moral analysis. And because anything that can make moral choices is effectively a person, the TV set becomes a character in the movie. You can talk to it, and it will answer. It has wants and goals. And it is very angry with you.

The family to whom all this happens in Poltergeist is presented as aspirational: upper-middle class homeowners who genuinely love each other and whose biggest headache at the moment is the construction of their private swimming pool. They don't have problems in their lives. Why make a movie about happy people?

As it turns out, their comfort rests on a pile of hidden cruelty. Their entire suburb was built on a cemetery that the developers didn't bother relocating. And this serves as an indictment of an entire way of life: these are the Reagan years, when the individualistic model of success was being preached as the definitive fulfillment of every human need. Our protagonists certainly look like they have nothing to worry about. But their happiness requires literally sweeping a lot of suffering under the rug. I don't need to recount the centuries of injustice and violence upon which American prosperity was amassed. Nor does Poltergeist pause for a single moment to moralize against our protagonists. The nightmare scenario it proposes speaks for itself: all your comfort created a debt, and that debt will come calling. And it will devour your children.

It's interesting that '80s suburban mythologizing focused so much on the children who were growing up in that space. The quasi-Puritan anxiety that rose against cities as alleged dens of vice and crime led to the creation of those artificial bubbles for raising children. But in those same '80s movies, the children are the first to fall through the cracks on that bubble.

In Poltergeist, the suburban children couldn't be more absurdly privileged. Their bedroom boasts a hodgepodge of product placement that must have sufficed to pay for the movie. They're innocent of the evil awakened by their parents, but they're its chosen targets, with their instruments of everyday joy, their toys, serving as the weapons through which their lives are snatched away. And at the top of those toys sits the ultimate entertainment invention, the provider of hours upon hours of cheap smiles: the TV.

It would seem odd to pair the unacknowledged blood left behind by American growth and the specific concerns that were circulating about the omnipresence of TV. They're two very different sources of fear. But what the TV symbolizes is precisely that prosperity. The medium is the message, and the message is that you now have luxury of spare time to sit and watch. The moral panic warned that guiding your life by the TV schedule was a scourge on society, but in reality, if you even have the time to live by the TV schedule, you're immensely fortunate. In the '80s, the TV is one of the ultimate signifiers of mass-accessible affluence (along with other traditional American life milestones, such as owning a car). So it's fitting that Poltergeist turns the TV into the executioner's weapon that will collect the old debt.

When the veil of mystery is parted and we get to see the otherworldly creatures that threaten this life of comfort, they don't seem all that scary. Of course, I say this now, having survived through The Thing and Gremlins and The Fly and Predator and Hellraiser and Beetlejuice and They Live and Child's Play and plenty of others. It's too late for me to experience those images for the first time. I have no way of confirming how horrifying Poltergeist really was, and, as I said above, the stylistic resemblance to Close Encounters of the Third Kind does its scare factor no favors. I bet many moviegoers in 1982 must have drawn the same connection in their head. Poltergeist remains as a very acute piece of social commentary, but as a horror movie, I find it rather quaint. Almost cute.

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

While not for everyone, Phantasm is an ode to boyhood, brothers, sci-fi, and not taking any shit.

Weird, light, cynical, musical fun

I went all the way back to the ‘80s to find this classic horror musical for my First Scare piece. The idea of “musical” and “horror” normally has me heading in the opposite direction. The closest I’ve come is seeing Phantom of the Opera at the Fox Theater in Atlanta and my obligatory viewings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in college. But, after decades of skipping this story (including the constant stage productions at all levels), I have finally watched Little Shop of Horrors for the first time.

I was surprised to discover that the story of the murderous, man-eating plant is framed by a trio of singers (Tichina Arnold, Michelle Weeks, Tisha Campbell) who appear in each scene and act as a Greek chorus for the story. In 1960s New York, nerdy, awkward, underdog Seymour Krelborn (Rick Moranis) lives and works in a rundown plant shop in a rundown neighborhood. We know this thanks to the catchy opening song, “Little Shop of Horrors,” and the really well executed follow up song “Downtown / Skid Row.” His beleaguered but awkwardly glamorous co-worker is Audrey (Ellen Greene), who is dating an abusive boyfriend, Orin (Steve Martin). The curmudgeonly but mostly okay store owner, Mr. Mushnik (Vincent Gardenia), becomes frustrated at the lack of business and wants to close the store—to the dismay of Audrey and Seymour. Seymour shows them an unusual little plant he found shortly after a recent solar eclipse and suggests displaying it in the shop window to attract customers. Despite hesitation from the owner, the plan works and the store becomes a success as curious customers stop by to see the weird, Venus flytrap-like plant, and then make other purchases at the store. When the plant begins to wilt, Seymour discovers (after a musical number) that the plant actually wants to be fed human blood.

To keep the store’s success going, Seymour gives the plant his blood. The plant (an eventually giant puppet voiced by R&B singer Levi Stubbs) grows larger and demands more blood. Over time, the store and Seymour become successful, but Seymour begins to suffer from blood loss. The plant convinces Seymour to kill and dismember someone to make food, and it suggests Audrey’s abusive, dentist boyfriend as the victim. As the film progresses, Seymour’s fame grows along with the size of the plant, but it comes at the price of the plant killing people and ultimately seeking world domination. Seymour has to learn to set boundaries and find his strength in order to defeat the plant, save the world, and secure his true love, Audrey.

Little Shop of Horrors was unexpectedly fun to watch for two reasons: 1) the music and 2) the '80s A-list comedy cast. First of all, the music was excellent. It’s weird to say that about a horror comedy, but the songs were fun. Tisha Campbell, Tichina Arnold, and Michelle Weeks do a great Supremes routine, constantly and magically appearing in new costumes and singing through all sorts of shenanigans by the lead actors. Thoughtful songs like “Downtown” bring in some societal commentary on class struggles and allow for emotional solos on the monstrosity of real life. Rick Moranis is the only one who doesn’t belt out his songs, but that fits since he is playing the insecure, awkward young man. If you’ve seen him in Ghostbusters, he is playing the same type of character.

The second thing I enjoyed about the film was the cast. The film has basically an all-star cast of 1980s comedy A-listers, including Steve Martin, Bill Murray, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Christopher Guest, and James Belushi. It's also fun to see super-young Tisha Campbell and Tichina Arnold sliding through the absurdity and violence of the story as background commentators. Steve Martin manages the most unlikeable character in the film, the violent dentist and unrepentant bully, by playing Orin as an Elvis / Fonzie parody. His violence is a serious topic and, at least, the entire cast, including Orin himself, acknowledges that he is a terrible person. Lastly, a little internet research told me that the voice of the plant is Levi Stubbs, the lead singer of The Four Tops. No wonder his voice was so appealing.

There were a few parts I didn’t enjoy as much. I thought Mr. Mushnik deserved better treatment. He takes in Seymour and tries to get Audrey away from Orin, warning her that Orin is a bad guy, so I'm not sure why his character was treated in an ultimately negative way. The puppet plant was, of course, distracting, although the heavy-handed puppetry added to the farcical nature of the story, especially when Audrey II’s true murderous motives are revealed.

Little Shop of Horrors is too weird and quirky to become a favorite for me, but I’m surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did. If you want something creepy but also comedic but also in a musical style (and who doesn't), Little Shop of Horrors will fit the bill.

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Highlights

• Fun music
• '80s comedy stars
• Weird but entertaining

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

A masterpiece of politics, people, magic, murder, and war

Cover design and illustration by Lucy Scholes

I almost didn’t read this book. I had enjoyed the first book in this series, She Who Became the Sun (SWBTS), so much, and felt so satisfied by its ending, that I was hesitant to crack open the sequel for fear of a disappointment. But I was not disappointed, my friends! Everything that made SWBTS an outstanding book returned, in spades, in He Who Drowned the World. Twisty turny betrayals? Court politics? Conquest strategy? Tragic character arcs? Explorations of gender presentation? Wang Baoxiang¹? Yes, yes, and yes. Also yes. And, yes, again, yes.

If you have not read SWBTS you need to put down your device right now and go read it. It is superb. It won the British Fantasy Award both for Best Newcomer² (it is Parker-Chan’s debut novel) and for Best Novel overall. It follows the initial rise to power of Zhu Yuanzhang, historically the founder of the Ming Dynasty. However, in this telling, Zhu is not the son of a tenant farmer, but the daughter, so disfavoured that she is not even given a name. In a searing first chapter, relentless drought and famine, combined with a bandit attack, destroy her family, including her brother, who had been given a prophecy of greatness by the village fortune-teller. The girl, whose own fortune was a laconic ‘Nothing’, refuses to accept this future. She takes her dead brother’s name, and with it decides that she will fool the fates and take his fortune of greatness as well; and for the rest of the book she becomes Zhu Chongba, a man whose rise to power you can read about in the history books (or the wikipedia page I linked earlier). SWBTS ends with Zhu’s victory halfway up the ladder to total domination: she has taken the city of Yingtian, changed her name to Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, and declared that she will lead her people to rout the Mongols from China. 

It is a wildly satisfying ending. I loved it. But it is not the end of the story. The Mongols are not gone yet, and the Ming Dynasty has not yet been founded.

He Who Drowned the World continues that story, from three primary perspectives. All three are familiar from SWBTS, and all three have achieved the first stage of their goals from that first book.

First, we have Zhu Chongba (now Zhu Yuanzhang), who’s doing pretty well! She’s in charge of an army and recognized as the Radiant King of her people in the southern regions of the disputed territory. She further holds the indisputable Mandate of Heaven, which manifests as the ability to generate light and see ghosts. She is also well-supported by her wife, Ma, who has managed to get over a bit of child-murder at the end of the last book. The child in question held a Mandate of Heaven of his own,³ so Zhu had to off him in order to remove a possible rival to her own claim. To be honest, the kid was a bit creepy throughout the book, so his murder didn’t really bother me as much as it probably should have.

Second, we have General Ouyang. Ouyang has also managed to achieve the first step in his life goal. When he was a child, his family was captured and murdered by the Prince of Henan, down to the last man — except him. Him the prince castrated and left alive, and Ouyang has since grown up as a kind of pet eunuch to the family, acquiring enormous skill in murder and warfare, rising to command the entire army of Henan, while nursing in his bosom the desire for revenge. His only goal in life now is to revenge himself upon the Mongols — but he’s not happy about it. He had started building a kind of life for himself, anchored by his deep, agonized, sort-of-but-not-really-but-kind-of sexual-romantic attraction to the Prince’s son,  Esen, who  in turn trusts Ouyang utterly. So Ouyang has been kind of putting off the first step in his revenge, until battlefield losses to Zhu kind of force the issue. By the end of SWBTS he has betrayed and murdered Esen, and feels pretty darn miserable about it. But that’s ok: All that remains for him to do now is to find and murder the Great Khan, and then his life will be complete. He is not in a good head-space, but he’s got his goals and is making progress toward them.

Third we have Wang Baoxiang. Wang was Esen’s brother, and now, after Ouyang’s murder-spree, the Prince of Henan. He is deeply pissed at how everyone has been treating him: they see him as effeminate and unmanly for being bad at stabbing, and refuse to recognize his bureaucratic skills. So he’s decided to use those skills to climb the ranks at court, and become the Great Khan himself. Also, he’s haunted by his brother’s ghost (he may have had something to do with smoothing the way for Ouyang to do the murder), and seems to have some sort of Mandate of Heaven of his own.

What makes He Who Drowned the World just sing is the way each of these characters engages with the same themes from different perspectives. Each has a clear goal which in some way requires taking down the Great Khan. Zhu is the merry warrior, who never doubts the rightness of her path. Ouyang is the tortured warrior, who is fighting the blackness of despair at every step, and regularly doubts the rightness of his path. But — having taken that terrible first step in betraying and murdering Esen — Ouyang cannot allow himself to take any other path. no matter the kinder opportunities that present themselves. Wang, too, is tortured by despair, unable to turn off his cruel, traitorous path to power, despite meeting kindnesses of his own that might, in other circumstances, have made a difference. But for all the similarity between Ouyang and Wang, Wang is not a warrior, so his actions are fundamentally different in strategy from Ouyang's. And all three of them, to one extent or another, must face the question: Is it all worth it? 

Another key theme is the subversion of gender roles. Zhu is the clearest example of this: a woman posing as a man. Or perhaps a non-binary person who takes up whichever gender presentation suits her needs at the moment. She does not envy men their bodies, except inasmuch as their larger size and strength makes them better at fighting; and she does not hate her own, except inasmuch as it poses obstacles to her goals. Honestly, she’s much more inconvenienced by her missing right hand (which Ouyang cut off in SWBTS) than she is by her anatomy.⁴

Not so Ouyang, who is a eunuch, and hates it. He has the manliest of manly roles — the general of an army — and yet everyone describes him as beautiful, woman-like. He is effectively the opposite of Zhu, who approaches gender from a deeply pragmatic perspective: she benefits both from everyone’s acceptance of her as a man as well as her ability to present as a woman when subterfuge is required. She gets the best of both worlds. By contrast, Ouyang, who abhors everything female, is denied maleness as well. Like Zhu, he is mutilated, but unlike Zhu, this obstacle is connected with gender. He gets neither world, and his misery and despair in no small part springs from that.

Wang Baoxiang offers a third perspective on gender roles: he is a man, a cis-het man, with all the relevant anatomy. But he is seen as unmanly (because he does bureaucracy instead of battle), and perceived as being one of those men who sleep with other men. He doesn’t like this perception, which contributes to the general social disrespect that motivates his own actions throughout the book; but he’s not above using it to his advantage, to make alliances and develop relationships that he can exploit and betray when the time comes.

Oh, and speaking of relationships, I’ve got to mention the sexual encounters in this book. Because, dang. There are a lot of them, and not a single one is built on basic kindness or affection. Every single sexual encounter is a power play, a political act, a treachery, a betrayal, manipulation. The degree to which Parker-Chan can construct such a wide variety of unhealthy sexual encounters, all of which are vital to the plot, is astonishing.

Because, yes, they are all vital to the plot. The plot is intricate, subtle, heart-breaking, surprising, inevitable, and deeply, deeply satisfying. The twisty-turny politics, the subtle character studies, the psychology of ambition and regret and sacrifice for a larger goal, are all woven into an astonishing tapestry. It is dark and brutal, with a great deal of dismemberment, but there is just enough hope and goodness that it’s not all awful. Just barely. Maybe. Assuming you don’t need a lot.

1 Wang Baoxiang is the half-brother of the Prince of Henan in SWBTS. He won my heart by being entirely uninterested in battle and manliness, instead turning his considerable brains to the minutiae of administration, supply, and all the other activities that make it possible to feed, outfit, and field an army to do the stabby bits. ‘Moar Wang!’ became my battle cry at my book group meeting. Friends, there is so much Wang in He Who Drowned the World. 

2 Full disclosure: I was on the the panel for that award, and I don’t mind sharing that there was no disagreement at all among panelists that SHBTS was far and away the winner.

3 The Mandate of Heaven hedges its bets. Sometimes as many as three or four people may hold it at one time. It recognizes the potential to be Emperor, but it does not mark inevitability. As demonstrated by the dead kid from SWBTS.

4 Mutilation, in this world, is seen as deeply wrong. Ghosts of mutilated people turn into soul-eating monsters; and even before they are dead such people are shunned and reviled, refused entry into monasteries and other important locations. Actions like, oh, say, sending a jar of pickled hands to your enemy have a very particular resonance in this context.

—

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10, mind-blowing/life-changing/best.book.evar

Highlights:

•     Trenchant psychological character work
•     Betrayal, politics, and manipulation
•     Twisty turny gender stuff

Reference: Parker-Chan, Shelley. He Who Drowned the World [Tor/Mantle, 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.

Boo.

Three weeks are nowhere near enough to get a good look at the vastness of classic horror. During our First Scare series at Nerds of a Feather, we've made our best effort to use the available time to fill some important gaps in our personal horror libraries. I'm going to need even more time to digest what I've learned; I still don't have fully formed thoughts about what makes horror so popular, or how the successive trends in horror have come and gone, or where the line is between the horror I can tolerate and the one I can't force myself to watch. Nevertheless, this brief round of exploration has been fruitful.

I had originally planned to include more monster movies (i.e. Attack of the Giant [Insert Species]), but the bulk of my watching activity ended up centering on the evolution of cinematic Dracula (1931, 1958, 1974 and 1979). Much like the experiment I did years ago with the different versions of Carrie, this repetitive journey through the beats of the same basic story has shown me the shifting worries of their respective societies. Most notably, inasmuch as any adaptation of Dracula allows, I could notice the female roles evolving over the decades from highly prized models of chastity to more autonomous agents in possession of their own desires. This transformation is fully ripe by the time Coppola tries his hand at making a Dracula movie in the '90s.

It's important to be aware of this history, because much of contemporary horror has to do with foregrounding women's fears. There are two parallel consequences of this trend: on one hand, it exposes the uncomfortable fact that daily life for women under patriarchy is a 24/7 horror story; on the other hand, it demands of male moviegoers the development of an added meta level of empathy. In horror there's an important difference between the aesthetic experience of being personally scared and the aesthetic experience of watching someone else be scared, and it all comes down to which character you identify with, an outcome that isn't always open to the viewer's conscious choice. In the standard horror dynamic of the chaser chasing the chased, whose perspective do you automatically adopt?

For these reasons I count myself fortunate to have been joined by two women in reviewing movies for First Scare. I found it interesting to read, in Haley's review of the movie Phantasm, about the mental jump of identifying with a boy protagonist in the '70s while writing as a woman in the 21st century. At the same time, when Ann Michelle writes about Interview with the Vampire, she opts for taking the side of the women that are mistreated all through the movie.

The unsurprising lesson here is that different stories evoke different modes of empathy. Haley finds a sense of recognition in the shared experience of a girls' sleepover in House, while Ann Michelle feels drawn to the deep interiority of the boy protagonist of The Sixth Sense. But the real merit of horror is in forcing us to understand the nonhuman perspective, as in the case of a ghost in Kill, Baby Kill or a carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors.

And then there's just the plainly bonkers.

Keep these ideas in mind when you dress up tonight. Putting on a mask is more than a cosmetic choice. It's another form of empathy, one that brings the Other's perspective not only into your mind, but into your speech and movements, and furthermore invites those watching you to participate in the same game when they interact with you.

If you'll allow me to borrow a trope from another genre for a moment, in many martial arts movies you'll hear the deepity-sounding lesson, "be the sword." Well, dear reader: tonight, when you put on your witch hats and your werewolf fangs and your fairy wings and your hero capes, I invite you to wield that uniquely human superpower of putting yourself in the Other's shoes. When you dress up to be spooky, open yourself to the gift of being spooked. Be the mask.

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

I'm currently reading RJ Barker's Gods of the Wyrdwood. I'm a bit behind, as the sequel to it has just come out and is sitting on my desk waiting, but although I started reading it quite some time ago, I had to set it aside for a while -- not due to anything to do with the book, really. It's been a rough year and RJ's a brilliant writer; his worlds are wildly fantastic and his characters are engaging while carrying a lot of shadows, people you really start to care about. I love his work, but when I'm stressed and exhausted myself, reading something where you're immersing yourself in a new, very unfamiliar world and in characters dealing with a lot of heavy stuff can take energy I just didn't have, and I wanted to enjoy my reading of the Wyrdwood. Now that I'm picking it up again, finding my way back into it, and am not quite so tired, I'm finding it utterly enthralling. Some aspects of the world are like a fever-dream half-remembered, strange and beautiful or strange and terrible, while the characters are always firmly rooted in their human nature, even when their actual humanity is debatable. 

At the time of my writing this, a forthcoming book I'm waiting for eagerly is Karla's Choice, by Nick Harkaway (though I expect it'll be out, purchased, and read, before this interview is posted). I have a lot of favourite books, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People are among them. I first read LeCarré as a teen and those two had a big influence on me. Usually I don't like people writing other people's people, as it were, but Harkaway has the connection with this that, for me, gives it a feeling of more rightness, and since he's an excellent writer on his own merits in the sff field, I'm very interested to see what he does with Smiley. 

3. Is there a book you're currently itching to re-read?

Last month I was rereading some of my Arthur Ransome collection and I had a great urge to reread We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea (published 1937, part of his Swallows and Amazons series and quite possibly the best of them all) but my only copy is a Puffin paperback from what I call the Bad Glue Era -- it's held together by being tied up with a piece of string. I decided to treat myself to a nice old hardcover copy, and wait to read that. Unfortunately the used and rare bookseller in the UK failed to seal the package, WDMTGTS fell out -- a first edition, though a later printing from the forties, and I am sick at the thought of that lost and tossed in some post office garbage can. I received an opened package in a plastic bag from the Royal Mail, with that book missing. The bookseller has a second copy (in worse shape, sadly) with which they're going to replace it, hopefully taping the package shut this time ... But meanwhile I am still itching to reread that one in particular. The Swallows -- John, Susan, Titty, and Roger Walker -- are spending some time with a young man on his yacht, Goblin, in harbour at the mouth of the River Orwell, but there's an accident while he's ashore, he ends up unconscious in hospital, and in fog and rising tide Goblin slips her anchor and they drift out into the North Sea. Once they realize what's happening, being sensible nautical children, they do all the right things to try to sail back, but between fog and shoals and storm they end up only able to go on, and cross to Flushing in the Netherlands, where -- because in stories some coincidence is allowed, due to narrativium -- their father is about to cross on his way back overland from a posting in Hong Kong. Not only is it a great adventure story, in which you really see the older two, John and Susan (who are probably about either side of thirteen in this one) coming into their own, having to stand in for the adults in a genuinely life and death situation, but it's one of the books from which I learnt most about sailing. You could read the part of The Last Road in which Moth sails alone and through storm back to the abandoned island homeland of her people as a tribute to We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea. 

One that comes to mind is Patricia A. McKillip's Kingfisher, which I'm currently reading for the nth time. It's an amazing book, fascinating and beautiful, and written with such a deft, light hand. It's a fantasy with a modern setting, though not a real world one, woven around Chretien de Troyes' twelfth-century Romance Perceval and the Mabinogion. The landscape is that of the Oregon coast of the US and the technological level is, or was at the time of its publication in 2016, slightly near-future, seamlessly combined with a world of magic. For all the motorcycles and cellphones and high-tech weaponry, it's a story of questing knights and young people, men and women, finding themselves deep in myth and mysteries. It's also very much a book celebrating cooking! The way McKillip was able to weave all these elements together and tell a story at once so solid and satisfying, and at the same time so poetic and full of dappled shadows and things half-seen, is awe-inspiring and perfect. The feel of the book is like reading a poem, and yet it's full of well-rounded, down-to-earth characters getting to grips with things even when those things are strange and half-seen at best. I don't so much wish I'd written it -- no one but McKillip could have done that -- as I wish I could achieve something that could leave readers feeling how I feel when I'm reading it. McKillip, like Diana Wynne Jones, is a writer who leaves me in awe. 

5. What's one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing? 

There are a lot of those! Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills, taken as one for this answer, are among them. (The concluding book about Merlin, The Last Enchantment, is excellent but didn't have as much of an impact on me as a child.) The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills are about Merlin as a child and young man in post-Roman Britain. They're part of the long tradition of the "historical" Arthurian matter rather than the Romance tradition -- if you're interested in that distinction, I'd direct you to my fellow CMS alumnus Richard Moll's book Before Malory: Reading Arthur in Later Medieval England. For me, Stewart's Merlin and Arthur remain the only true and definitive versions! When I wrote an Arthurian story myself ("The Inexorable Tide" in The Storyteller), I couldn't get away from some of her facts -- Merlin and Arthur as first cousins, for instance. Her narrative style, too, was an impressive example of how to handle the first person, though I was reading other first person narratives at the time, particularly John Buchan. Merlin's reflective approach, looking back on his own life, a conscious telling that catches up with itself partway through The Last Enchantment, has, I think, always made me aware of the constructed frame, present or not in the story, implicit in using the first person, so that I need to know who the audience within the book is, and at what point the character is telling any particular part of their story. It's not something unique to Stewart -- Treasure Island has a definite "now" from which Jim is looking back on his story, though in contrast Buchan doesn't usually do that, you're never told from what point in his life Hannay is narrating his adventures -- but it was through Mary Stewart's Merlin that I first became aware of that device and absorbed how it worked, and why you would choose do it. The setting, too, influenced me, that lingering post-Roman world of multiple languages and old buildings falling into ruin or being repurposed, the worship and rites of old gods and new mingling, that sense that there is a wider world beyond the horizon and that what happens there will spread ripples across the lands and years between. 

The Wolf and the Wild King: snow, swordfights (Mairran, armed, on horseback = Ladyhawke vibes), and dragons.

To expand on that, my latest book is The Wolf and the Wild King, out from Crossroad Press's Mystique imprint. It's the first part of a duology, The Forest. For a long time, I had been wanting to write something that captured -- call it a particular mood, or maybe a mode, of fantasy, something elusive that I was missing in my current reading. I wanted that feeling of things unseen, of mystery, of ancient rites and remnants of older powers still there if only you know how to call on them, and forests and dragons and the intense mythic mood. I wanted a winter book that acknowledged the depth of winter and used it, not just a delicate southern set-dressing of snow. The Wolf and the Wild King is my attempt to capture some of that, writing about protagonists, Mairran and Lannesk, Nowa and Sage, who may have grown out of some ur-characters who've been with me a long, long time, but who are their own people now, and a pleasure to write. Mairran, who is wolf, raven, and the prince who serves as his mother executioner for ritual sacrifices, and Lannesk, the mute outlaw and musician, are younger than my usual adult main characters, being just twenty-one or so, warriors and musicians both, full of confusion and strong emotions -- mostly, in Mairran's case, anger that he's not admitting to but which is affecting everything he does; he's kind and savage, the latter not least to himself. To balance the intense mythic background, Mairran has a first-person narration that can, if not undercut the air of folkloric mystery and ancient legend, act as a foil to it. He's angry and snarky and hurting, and a lot of the time he pretends none of that is there in himself and he's just being a dutiful child, serving the Queen his mother and it's not strange at all that she's as old as her reign and has no name and no past. Lannesk's story unfolds a couple of centuries earlier, at a time before the Queen's rule, when the Forest is being invaded by dragon-kin led by sorcerer-priests whose magic is fuelled by human sacrifice; he and his brother are reprieved from death at the hands of their stepfather's cousin and slayer by their oath to follow two of the Immortals, the Wild King and the Grey Hunter, in fighting the invaders. Through battle and loss and death, Lannesk's story intersects with Mairran's. Nowa is Mairran's shield-companion, an older woman who's been with him since he was a boy. She was captain of a company of the Queen's road-wardens, then his tutor; now he calls her his keeper. She's constrained in what she can protect him from, but she's made it her personal mission to keep him sane and keep him from becoming the unthinking, uncaring knife that the Queen would have him. Sage is a girl of around fourteen, a Forest-dwelling outcast Mairran captures when she tries to rob his camp. She's also a fox, in an era when such Forest-blessings are so rare they've become the stuff of legend and fear. Being captured by the Queen's son, about whom little is known among the folk generally except that he's the priest of the solstice sacrifices and probably mad, is not Sage's idea of a rescue at first, even when the alternative seems to be dying in the winter Forest. All these characters are brought together around Mairran's quest to find a murderer, but that's not really the story at all -- it just takes Mairran quite a while to realize it.

Lyorn by Steven Brust

Many of Steven Brust’s novels, at least in his Jhereg sequence, play a narrative game with structure—sometimes with a food recipe, sometimes as a gothic novel—and in Lyorn Brust plays with the structure of musical theater. Smarter readers than I will be able to tell you how significant that structure is to the actual novel, but at a minimum I think it’s because it helps Brust maintain interest in what he is writing because he is also working out if he can pull off a Vlad Taltos story while doing something else.

With Lyorn he absolutely pulls it off and makes the gimmick work. This certainly could be a “your mileage may vary” situation if you’re typically not into theater, or into musical theater in particular, but Brust plays with the theater world while weaving in the story of the assassin in hiding (and bits of the larger relationship storyline of Vlad and his ex-wife Cawti, which frankly is the core of the series to me) and if it’s not a romp and not quite a farce, Lyorn is a delightfully fun book.

Lyorn is the seventeenth novel in the Vlad Taltos series (out of a proposed nineteen) and is thus far the latest novel in the chronology, taking place after the events of 2014’s Hawk (book 14; the two books between Hawk and Lyorn are set earlier in the chronology). This is the book where it finally feels like Brust is making a real push towards a series ending of some sort.

Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker

Haunt Sweet Home is a perfect story to read just before Halloween. A young woman gets a job as an intern on a reality-haunted-house show (think Ghost Hunters or any of those paranormal investigation shows) and readers get a solid behind-the-scenes on how those shows are constructed through the introduction of Maya to an unfamiliar workplace.

That’s interesting, but not quite enough to make Haunt Sweet Home a good spooky season read. Where Sarah Pinsker shines is in slowly ratcheting up the weirdness, because all is not quite as it seems, and Maya is caught up in the middle of something a lot weirder than a TV show that fakes hauntings.

Pinsker is a master storyteller who doesn’t tell the same story twice, and Haunt Sweet Home is another outstanding story filled to the brim with heart. There’s haunts in the aforementioned weirdness, absolutely. No question. But Pinsker’s telling of Maya’s story is that of a woman beginning to find out who she is and who she wants to be. I’m not sure Haunt Sweet Home is a coming-of-age story when the person coming of age is in her mid-twenties, but that’s the vibe Pinsker brings. Plus ghosts. Don’t forget about the ghosts.

Extinction by Douglas Preston

The way I want to describe Extinction is that it’s like Jurassic Park, except it’s bringing back mammoths and other more recently extinct animals, and adds in a murder plot possibly by some ecological terrorists—but that’s really only the initial frame job of the book. Honestly, as much as I generally enjoyed Extinction, that is also the story I generally wish the full novel was.

Extinction (the novel) rolls into the secrets of the extraordinarily wealthy company reversing the extinction (the concept) of multiple species and how far that research may go, and ultimately *that* is the direction the novel pushes. My experience reading Extinction was an exercise in continually resetting my expectations of what sort of novel it would turn out to be—which on one hand is perhaps what I should want, because Extinction is all about discovery. On the other hand, every reset was a turn away from the parts of the novel I most enjoyed. I’m in the minority on this, I think.

The ultimate problem I have, for a novel I generally enjoyed, is that, when the scope of the real story is finally widened far enough to get to what’s actually going on, my reaction was to raise one eyebrow like I’m the Rock raising the People’s Eyebrow, and start to back away from the storytelling.

It’s fine.

Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather, Hugo and Ignyte Award Winner. Minnesotan.

What's there to be afraid of? Wouldn't you want to go see it for yourself?

In a remote house in the woods, a mother raises two kids. They have no contact with other people. This is by choice. They subsist on what they can find in the forest, but they're terrified of what could lurk out there. Whenever they walk outside, they tie themselves to a long rope whose other end is attached to the foundations of the house. As long as they're tethered to a place built from love, they can feel safe. There's no telling what might happen if they lost contact with the rope.

Never Let Go is a subtle kind of horror, one based on the anticipation of unseen things. It's no coincidence that the Bible gives "anticipation of unseen things" as a definition of faith. The mother (Halle Berry) has created a cultish dynamic in the house, constantly warning her kids about a nameless, formless evil that could devour them with a single touch without the protection of the rope. She makes them recite litanies and spend hours inside a dark box to purify their souls. It soon becomes clear that she'd have no problem killing any member of the family touched by the evil, and the dialogues establish that she has already done it more than once. Understandably, the kids are growing up in a very confused state, unsure of what they should fear more: the forest and its mysteries, or their mother and her zeal.

Several questions emerge as we learn what few bits of backstory the mother is willing to disclose. The central one in the movie is: Do you feel afraid because you're seeing monsters, or are you seeing monsters because you feel afraid? And also: Is there such a thing as loving your family too much? Are the archetypal intrafamilial betrayals (Hansel and Gretel's parents, or Cain and Abel) fated to reoccur in each generation? How do you tell when love is starting to demand too high a price? And what space is there for you to grow when the extent of your world is one person?

The child characters are far from prepared to face those questions, and the child actors convey that anxiety marvelously. Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) is the more devoted one, happy to be disciplined and eager to prove his loyalty to his mother. Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) is the more curious one, willing to question arbitrary rules and investigate what the real danger is. When the family's food supply dwindles to an alarming degree, and the mother makes a desperate proposal to ensure everyone's survival, the children's opposite perspectives finally clash, and the fragility of their self-imposed isolation is shattered by uncomfortable truths.

The ever-present rope that connects this family is a powerful symbol. A rope can be a lifeline, or it can be a noose. Adhering to an invariable rule of never letting go can blur the line between staying safe and staying trapped. The mother is eventually revealed to have lacked a healthy model of parental love, and the way she's chosen to handle her own turn at parenting makes the kids' doubts justified.

The movie plays a clever game with the audience's beliefs. The dreaded evil has so far been invisible to the children; it only manifests to the mother's eyes in the shape of people she's watched die. Why don't the children see it? Is the evil merely in the mother's head, or is it playing a long game to catch her sons with their guard down? For a good stretch of the movie's runtime, both possibilities are presented as equally likely. It's immediately obvious that the mother isn't entirely reliable, but (and here's one of the oldest tricks in the horror arsenal) what if she's right? What if the world really did end in mass murder and this family is all that is left?

Later plot developments that must not be spoiled give a cruel spin to these questions. The choices that the kids make when their mother is not next to them appear to demonstrate the resourcefulness of evil. Then again, the evil that those choices express wouldn't have happened if the mother hadn't taught them about evil in the first place. Do we become tainted from simply hearing about the human imperfections? Does this mean that not even solitude in pristine nature is a refuge from the flaws of society?

Never Let Go starts as a survival movie about a mother bravely fighting to protect her children, but it gradually reaches the idea that you cannot shield children from evil forever. They will grow, and you will die. They need to learn how to face evil without you, and if you seriously try to keep them safe forever, what you're actually doing is make them your prisoners. Obsession with hidden enemies typically leads to seeing enemies in each other. He who fights monsters, etcetera.

In a scene loaded with layers of meaning, the mother explains to the kids that pictures do more than show images: they show feelings. To me, that's an invitation to not read the movie literally. This picture is not simply the story of a family hiding from a threat that ended the world. It's a picture that says that our fears don't have to be our children's fears, that what creates enemies is the very concept of enemies, and that a form of love that is unwilling to let you go is precisely the form of love you most need to let go of.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

 A familiar remix of familiar ideas, with not quite enough of anything fresh or novel

I follow a lot of writers on social media, and one particular message that they often promulgate goes something like this:

Don’t be afraid to do something that’s been done before. Tropes are tools, not poison! Even if [other writer] did it first, YOU haven’t done it yet! The fact that it’s YOURS is all we need to make it special and new. Give us YOUR take on [trope]. Every new voice is valuable.

I’ve always enjoyed this perspective. It’s so fundamentally encouraging to shy new writers, an open-armed invitation to join a club, not to self-reject one’s work just because it doesn’t feel fresh. New voices are always fresh, even if they are offering familiar old stories. (If nothing else, the endless parade of retellings of myths and fairy tales is evidence enough of SFF’s (excessively?) high tolerance for familiarity.)

The problem is that, sometimes, even a new voice telling an old story is not enough to make that story fresh. And such was the impression I got from The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door. The scholar in question is one Clover Hill, a young woman who has grown up on a farm in northern England in the early 20th century, and had her life reasonably well planned out, in unthreatening but not terribly exciting detail. Then WWI hits, and her brother comes back from the front lines terribly damaged—not, as so many young men were, by the shells and the gas and the guns and bayonets, but because there was a supernatural element to the carnage. As Clover learns from her brother's comrade who brings him home, our world is overlaid with a world of magic, hidden but mighty, governed by old families who derive their power from intricate deals struck with the world of faerie next door.

One such magic-user was on the front lines of the fighting, and in all the carnage summoned a faerie. Something went wrong: the faerie was not contained, and a hideous curse struck down as many or more soldiers as any human-made weapon. Clover’s brother is unusual only because he mostly survived. But only mostly; he is not well, and he will not recover without help. So through perseverance and connections Clover manages to force her way into a spot at the school where all magic-users are trained, determined to learn the skills she needs to save her brother.

The  problem, though, is that the world of magic-dom was spooked by this catastrophic release of uncontrolled faerie magic, and so the teaching of faerie magic has been banned. All doors to faerie are closed and locked. Clover has no hope of learning to save her brother, unless she can find her own way to an open faerie door—which, if you’ve paid attention to the title of the book, is not an impossible task.

If you’ve spent much time reading fantasy books in the last 20 years, you’ll recognize a lot of these elements. A non-magical outsider goes to magic school where she must fight for a place among an entrenched magical aristocracy who don’t want her there. Harry Potter, anyone? Babel?  She finds a home and a core cohort of friends (The Secret History), but learns that there are dark secrets and hidden evils, and to save what she loves, she must destroy it (Scholomance). There’s even a tree that beats up people who get too close to the restricted section of the library. There is a Whomping Willow, for dog’s sake. The faeries, too, with their binding bargains peppered with dangerous loopholes, whose otherworldly weirdness is beyond human comprehension, give a lot of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell vibes, mixed with Lords and Ladies by Sir Terry Pratchett, or Lud in the Mist by Hope Mirrlees.

And, in principle, I’d be all over this. I’ve written before how I love me some faerie bargains. And this particular trope is freshened by being intertwined with another trope, in which faerie land becomes a metaphor for colonisation (hello, Under The Pendulum Sun!). Unfortunately, ‘Colonialism Bad Actually’ is a very low-hanging bit of low-hanging fruit to signal who the baddies are in your story—especially if those baddies in question have already been signalled to be baddies by being wildly misogynistic (snoooore).

And furthermore, using colonialism for faeries strikes me as problematic. One element that makes faeries (in general) work really well (for me) is their inhuman blue-and-orange morality. The idea that there are these sentient creatures whose values and morals are so wildly askew from human understandings of virtue is really, really compelling in fantasy storytelling. But if these creatures are also metaphorically equated with colonised people, we’re left with a deeply unfortunate implication that colonised people are inhuman and incomprehensible. To be fair, perhaps Parry picked up on this, because she eventually gives the faerie antagonists an entirely humanly comprehensible motivation for their actions, but in doing that, she betrays the blue-and-orange morality that makes faeries so compelling as a plot device in the first place. So we’re left with the worst of both worlds: colonised people are still incomprehensibly inhuman and other, and they don’t even have a satisfyingly weird value system.

The plot itself is fine. The pacing is good, and Parry decides to do a time-jump in the middle, rather than use the structural device of back-and-forth intertwining timelines, which I appreciated. Mixing timelines has always been rather frustrating to me, since one is always less interesting than the other. I find the secondary characters quite well drawn, too, with compelling motivations, and the development and collapse of that sparkling cohort of best friends in school felt very real. I had one group of friends in high school that I’ve fallen out of touch with; and another in college who I likewise haven’t spoken to in decades. The collapse of these close-knit bonds that feel unbreakable in youth, and the awkward groping back together after a decade of separation, landed very precisely in my feels, exactly as Parry intended. But for all that, the plot itself didn’t feel very exciting. There are some developments that could have led to very fun twists, and didn’t; and Clover’s angst about her desire to pursue this new life among the patriarchal upper-class colonisers felt forced and in places inconsistent. And I’d already seen the same thing done much more effectively in Babel.

I guess that’s the thing. This book had a lot of familiar elements in it, but the way they were combined didn’t make them into anything fresh or new. It was not more than the sum of its parts. It was exactly the sum of its parts—and each of its parts could also be found doing its bit more effectively in a different book. If you want faeries, (re)read Susanna Clarke and Terry Pratchett; if you want dark academia, (re)read Donna Tartt; or go for R. F. Kuang if you want it mixed with magic and colonialism. And if you want to read something by H. G. Parry that is genuinely fresh and novel, allow me to recommend The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep.

Highlights

You can humanize Nemo, but you can't Disneyfy colonialism

A character like Captain Nemo is challenging to write, all the more so in a prequel. Originally conceived by author Jules Verne as a Polish noble on a vendetta against the Russian Empire (which would have made the novel damaging to French foreign relations), upon publication he became an Indian noble on a vendetta against the British Empire. By the time we meet him in 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, he's a jaded misanthrope, self-banished from civilization, who in his burning hatred for tyrants has ended up creating his own little tyranny. The wonderful ship he commands is not a symbol of human progress, but a weapon of mass destruction (and eventual self-destruction). How do you turn such a character into a hero, when many in the audience already know who he's going to become in the novel?

One thing you can do is break free from the novel. The new TV series Nautilus, produced by Disney and then absurdly abandoned by Disney before being rescued by Amazon, rewrites Nemo as a revolutionary fighter who leads a rebellion of slaves and steals the Nautilus just before the East India Company can use it to take over world trade. This version of Nemo keeps the rough outline of the backstory Verne gave him: the British killed his family and stole his lands, so now he's an enemy of the British. Some (not enough) layers of complexity are added to that characterization. Verne's Nemo was fueled by raw spite; this Nemo begins headed in that direction, but is steered toward a gentler, more honest reckoning with his grief through his interaction with his crew. He may have a yearning for the abyss, but he comes to realize that he must not drag others down with him. Still, the character isn't written with the depth a lead role needs. Even after doing the hard work of earning the goodwill of his Designated Love Interest, in the last episode he makes a crucial choice against her wishes that reveals he hasn't paid attention to what she's been going through. So the most charitable description of his arc is from "total jerk" to "not a total jerk, but still very close."

A slightly better treatment is given to Nemo's crewmates. They don't even get names in the novel. In an adaptation that focuses so much on the theme of toppling hierarchies, that needed to be fixed. Alas, the cast we get is a mixed bag. Their use as comic relief is excessive, although it gradually lessens toward the middle of the season. One character in particular spends several episodes being nothing but comic relief, and not in an endearing way but in an annoying way, which later in the series detracts from the expected impact when his fortunes change for the worse.

This mishandling of tone is a major flaw of the series. It wants to be a sincere narrative of rebellion against cruelty, but it also wants to sand away its rough edges with the trademark Disney aesthetic. The result is an incongruity: a cutesy romp through colonies ravaged by famine and massacre; a kid-friendly, bloodless adventure where our heroes routinely face and barely escape the world's most brutally rapacious institution and end each episode with a goodhearted laugh. Disney wants to have it both ways, and fails at both. The way our heroes finally prevail against the East India Company, cleverly beating capitalists at their own game, relies on so many artistic licenses about the workings of a stock market that the fact it succeeds feels almost cartoonish.

The bright spots must be celebrated, though. Thierry Frémont's character is a great addition to Vernean lore as the engineer who designed the Nautilus. He's the voice of reason that tempers Nemo's effervescent passion, and making this character French is a nice homage to Verne as the titular submarine's actual creator. Céline Menville, one of the precious few women in the show, shines as a multiclass fugitive/bodyguard/chaperone/assassin with a mysterious past. Cameron Cuffe expertly channels the perennial detestability of aristocracy. Damien Garvey eats up each of his scenes with a gloating smirk of pure evil. Richard E. Grant has a fun cameo as a puppet ruler with skeletons in the closet. And Luke Arnold carries half of the show's emotional load in an incredibly complex role as Nemo's childhood friend who grew up to repay betrayal with betrayal.

Did you notice the key problem with the preceding paragraph? Most of the show's best-written roles are given to the white actors. Although Nautilus (the ship), and therefore Nautilus (the show), has a laudably diverse cast, reflecting the extent of the British Empire's depredation of the whole world, the script wastes some very talented actors by not giving their characters enough material to work with. This is one of the recurring consequences of the impractically short seasons of today's TV. The most that the script does to distinguish the members of Nemo's crew is to give each of them a couple lines of sad backstory; beyond that, their personalities may as well be interchangeable (the only exceptions, proving the rule, are the aforementioned characters reserved for the position of comic relief). In one episode, Nemo is berated for not knowing his crew on a personal level, but neither does the audience.

Nautilus is a great concept stretched thin by the pull of incompatible demands. In trying to bundle the grim realities of anti-colonial struggle in the same package with the childlike awe of exploring wonderful landscapes, it ends up much like the Avatar movies, doing a disservice to its own intended message.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Now complete, the Saevus Corax trilogy shows the wit, cynicism, nuance and a comprehensive experience of K. J. Parker in the long form. And my favorite of his works.

Tom Holt contains multitudes as an author. In his given name, he is a prolific writer of comedic and humorous fantasy. He’s also written historical novels under his given name, and poetry as well. And then there is his pen name of K. J. Parker. Parker has two modes: the short story, often with supernatural elements, a crisp and focused affair; and then there are his novels, most especially his trilogies. Most of these are set in the same world as the short stories (as far as one can tell) but are relentlessly mundane fantasy, with no magic or supernatural elements whatsoever, and constructing larger, longer narratives.

And so we come to his latest trilogy: Saevus Corax (Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead, Saevus Corax Captures the Castle, Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder). All three novels were released in a burst at the end of 2023, which reinforces the point that in all of his guises and facets, Parker is quite the prolific author.

As mentioned above, most of his novels and short stories are set in various times and places in the same fantasy world. Parkerland (for lack of any real defined name) is roughly, with a very few exceptions, based on an alternate Eurasia. There are some deliberately obfuscating and contradictory elements to Parker’s worldbuilding. There is no defined timeline anywhere in his novels and stories. We get plenty of references to events and characters (Salonicus, a playwright and con man who features in a few stories as a main character, has his work referenced in many other books, including here in the Corax trilogy). And maps? There are no official maps of Parkerland anywhere, and the very geography of the world feels fast and loose at times. It feels more than deliberate on Parker’s part.

I want to come to Corax directly on this last one, and discuss it, because it is at its heart a travelogue of a character who has been running away from his past his entire life. And so, while some if not many of Parker’s novels and stories take place in a relatively confined space (the City Trilogy, for example, mostly takes place in the titular Robur City), Corax is really different in that our main character ranges all across Parkerland. And where Corax doesn’t actually visit, he namedrops and has opinions on, or wonders what is happening as the overarching plot of the trilogy unfolds. So the Corax Trilogy is about a guy who roams a world where there are plenty of comparative references and places to go and things described, but is light on how everything is supposed to fit together.

Corax has a bigger problem than that. Even as he runs away from his past, a long simmering fight between much of the “West” (read: Western Europe) and the Sashan Empire (read: “Imperial Persia”) has been brewing. In point of fact, for more than two novels, Corax does his best to try and defuse and stop the conflict from happening with all of his wit, panache and machinations.. There is a deep irony in all this, but Corax makes it make sense.

For, you see, Corax’s main occupation for most of these three novels is as a battlefield salvager. Two sides have a battle, then leave, and firms such as the one Corax runs come in (having paid for the privilege), strip the armors, weapons, and other goodies, and take care of the dead bodies. Corax’s company is a second-tier outfit in this business, and his margins are crap, but he does the job anyway. It’s not his first career after he ran away from home, but he’s got a lot invested in it, so he keeps coming back to it, even with such weird diversions as becoming king of a rich island for a while. So you’d think that a big war between the Sashans and everyone else would be good for his bottom line, but you'd be wrong, and Corax is not shy in telling us why in detail. And yes, it is mainly the fact that hundreds of thousands or more people dead would be a tragedy. But even personally, it is also because no outfit, not even the Asphogel Brothers, the top-tier outfit, could handle a grand world war, much less Corax and his five hundred men.

So, for a trilogy about a guy who has run away from his past and finally landed on battlefield salvager after conflicts and wars, the trilogy is throughout rather against the whole idea of war in general. Corax is way too practical to think that war doesn’t solve anything; it's just that it's often a very bad solution to problems, and the collateral damage is frightful. He knows all this, and knows the reasons why the historical forces of commerce and need are driving toward war, but he tries to stop it any way he can.

So, in trying to stop the war (and spoiler, he is ultimately unsuccessful, and that itself is a tragedy on several levels, the more I think about it given events in the trilogy), Corax’s journeys across Parkerland make this my favorite of Parker’s works. Sure, I would like a definitive map, or even a timeline to make sense of when this trilogy takes place in relation to other works. We get some hints and signposts, but for all of the places we do visit and the things Corax sees and deals with, the lack of precision makes the trilogy, and Parker’s work in general feels somewhat more like M. J. Harrison than, say, Marshall Ryan Maresca in terms of the worldbuilding. A question I would like to ask Holt, should I ever get the chance: Is it at all straight and ordered and plotted out privately, for himself? Or does he delight in the contradictions and lack of certainty for readers?

But why would I want to read a book or a series of books where worldbuilding is frustratingly vague sometimes, especially someone like me, who likes consistency in such matters, and crunchy details? What else does Corax and Parker’s work hold for me? Glad you asked! First of all, there is the often mordant sense of humor, in the “another fine mess” school of humor, with dollops of Corax’s observations on his companions, life, the universe and everything else. There is a voice to a lot of Parker’s longform work that makes it feel like I am sitting in a tavern somewhere having a friend tell me about the improbable absurdities that have happened to him. And this comes up all the time in Parker’s novels, be it a Colonel of Engineers asked to defend a city with no resources, or a playwright winding up having to do a Prisoner of Zenda bit. Or Corax becoming king of a rich island on the eve of it being invaded. Or the time Corax met the real king of Sashan living in exile... with Corax’s ex-wife. And much more.

And there are real human moments in all of this, too. For all that Corax feels like a con man, rogue and reprobate, there is a real core question at the heart of the books: How and why did he really kill his brother? This is something that comes up again in the books, and there are several opinions on it, and even Corax doesn’t know the truth himself of the day his brother, the golden child of his noble family, died. Certainly his family (especially his father) has opinions... and a big price on his head (alive, not dead; Corax’s father wants him to *suffer*), and Corax does end up escaping from one capture plot after another. But for all of the “not again” aspects of these events, the central question of what set Corax on the run in the first place remains Rashomonian and there is a bit of a tragedy in that.

In addition, there is, in the trilogy, unexpectedly, a romance. It’s doomed and tragic, one that dare not even be thought, much less acted upon, for the greater part of two books. It’s part of the ultimate story, maybe tragedy, of Corax that he finds himself in a romance, or realizes he has been in one for years and never quite realized it (although it is clear his partner in the relationship has been far less clueless). The revelation of this romance, as well as other events in the third book, does do something Parker is good at in his trilogies, and that is tie the books together and get you to think about and reconsider the second, and especially the first book in the series and reinterpret events. And, for those who have the luxury and the will to do so, this also means that Parker’s longform work bears rereading.

And if you do read a swath of Parker, not only are there the teasing references here and there, but also the rhymes and repeats of themes played out in different ways. For example, there is the Salonicus novella “The Big Score,” which is his attempt to find the one job, the one con, the one weird trick that will let him retire to wealth and leisure. Corax and many of his companions are also looking for a Big Score, and while they look for ones very different from Salonicus’s too-clever-by-half plan, there is a resonance for those who read both works. Or consider how Corax’s efforts to stop a war at any cost are a dark reflection of the Engineer Trilogy, which is all about a man engineering a war for his own selfish ends, costs to others be damned (and an Engineer defending a city against all odds also ties into the Siege Trilogy).

I put K. J. Parker, in a narrower way, in the same class as Adrian Tchaikovsky, Elizabeth Bear and Walter Jon Williams. He not only bears rereading, but he is an author of a depth and a breath and a large oeuvre that means that a wide variety of readers of genre fiction can find at least one work in their writing that they could come to love. This also means, though, that there are works of his that you might bounce hard off of. But for me, while the City Trilogy is a lot of fun, and Salonicus is a fascinating character (playwright and con man all in wrong), I think for now my favorite Parker books are these three, detailing poor Corax’s misadventures across Parkerland. I look forward to where Parker goes next from here.

Highlights:

Pontypool is my favourite horror movie. Adapted from Tony Burgess’ cult novel, it follows the crew of a tiny Canadian local radio station on the night that a virus spread through language breaks out in their small town. As they become the story, and the story becomes a killer, the three must work out how to communicate with each other and the world. It’s intensely humane, relentlessly funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever seen.

It's ridiculously appropriate then that a story about a linguistic virus should evolve so well. As well as the excellent original book, there’s an audio drama using the movie’s cast and now, the show has jumped the Atlantic to land in the home of the other Pontypool, Wales.

For the next week, a stage production of Pontypool is playing in the Millennium Centre’s Westin Studio in Cardiff. I saw it last week, chatted to the director and had an incredibly good, fun night.

 This is a show that’s deeply Welsh in fascinating, subtle ways. In addition to relocating the story to the valleys, it also leans into the very real cultural divide between the different elements of the UK and the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from and who we are. No one tgells those stories louder than Grant Mazzy, the exiled shock jock at the heart of the play. Lloyd Hutchinson plays him with Clarksonian glee, revelling in the sound of his own voice and trying not to think about how far it carries. Thrown out of the BBC, Grant is a legend in his own lunchtime, performatively railing against the dying of the light from Beacon Radio’s tiny studio.

His only appreciative audience is Megan Davies, played by Mali O’Donnell. The production assistant for Beacon is intensely competent, cheerful and likes everyone, the social glue that holds Grant and producer Rhiannon Briar played by Victoria John together. O’Donnell and John are both fantastic and there’s a smartly handled dynamic between the two women that does the vital work of grounding the story. We find out as the story goes on that Rhi is guilt-ridden over the fact Megan is at the station. Not because of what she does but because of how small it is and how few opportunities there are. Grant is exiled here, Rhi feels like she’s the sole defender of the station status quo and Megan is quite happy where she is, even if Rhi isn’t. Three people at three different stages of their career, all crammed into a tiny studio on the day the world ends. Elements like that, and the universally strong cast give the play a foundation it only ever builds on. Its characters do the same, clinging to their training, using their job as a shield even as they slowly realise just how much trouble they’re in. John is especially good in this regard playing Rhi as furious, terrified, exhausted and relentless she’s just trying to understand the problem, even as Grant is trying to make the problem his road home.

The problem itself is chillingly well realised, and movement coordinator Lucy Glassbrook has given the virus victims (Referred to as ‘Conversationalists’ in the original text) a chilling set of common movements as the virus overtakes them. Director Dan Phillips uses this as a handle to crank the tension with the second half featuring an extended sequence where the radio staff are locked in with multiple victims. Because the event is so unprecedented, and Grant is often so self-absorbed, we notice before they do and the ‘IT’S BEHIND YOU!’ tension is cut with the horror of watching someone be taken over to create some gloriously dark theatrical horror. Philips and Robinson give us multiple cups too, with Corwyn Jones is particularly impressive as ‘helicopter traffic reporter’ Ken Loney who witnesses the original breakout in a manner that shatters his, his colleagues’ and our illusions that anything is safe.

That’s the big takeaway from the show. Hefin Robinson’s script comes at the original idea from a different angle that makes it both more focused and humane and, if anything, bleaker. Grant’s motivations are an oil and water slick of personal gain and altruism and as the second half continues and order collapses, he rises to the occasion whether anyone wants him to or not. Dan Phillips peppers that act with some glorious moments of theatricality, all of which land like the arcing flashlight blows of one character clubbing another to death on a near blacked out stage. Language, music, implication and psychology all mix in the increased damaged studio and your perception of the characters shifts even as the language they’re using does. The ending, whose final line has been on my tattoo list for years, is subtly retooled too, as Grant both tries to save the world and redeem himself. It’s not the end of the world, it’s not even the end of the show, but it’s the end of Grant Mazzy’s exile and God help anyone in his way.

 Every choice this show makes is smart. Every performance is top notch. The production looks brilliant. It deserves a longer run, a wider audience and a lot of acclaim and if you’re a horror fan and can make it to Cardiff, you need to see it.

Pontypool is currently playing at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff until November 16^th.

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Alasdair Stuart is a professional enthusiast, pop culture analyst, and writer behind the award-nominated weekly newsletter, The Full Lid. He is a multiple Hugo finalist and co-owns the Escape Artists podcast network. He can be found on bluesky.

Netflix adapts one of the most acclaimed classics of Latin American literature

Latin American history has been stained with blood since the time of colonization. The respective canons of our national literary traditions have variously grappled with the sense of disorientation of having to figure out how to build new nations after finally winning our independence; and the ever-present shadow of violence that haunted those first attempts (and that still haunts us in many ways) left a clear mark on our writers. But the special blend of Indigenous and Catholic beliefs that occurred in Mexico created a unique cultural relationship with death.

One of the manifestations of the role of death in Mexican consciousness is Juan Rulfo's 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, one of the biggest masterpieces of the Spanish language. Told in a minutely fragmented, extremely nonlinear style, it anticipated many of the technical innovations of what would eventually be called magical realism. It follows multiple first-person accounts in the remote town of Comala, where the main narrator travels to look for Pedro Páramo, his father. Pedro Páramo embodies the archetype of the Mexican macho: a selfish, violent authoritarian who exploits men and consumes women. His inner demons gradually turn him into a bitter loner, feared and hated by everyone. By the time the narrator arrives looking for him, Comala is an abandoned waste, its inhabitants long gone. But the deep pain that lived there still echoes in the walls and in the streets. Pedro left behind many tormented, restless spirits, from whose voices we piece together his story.

Pedro is a rich landowner at a time when the Mexican Revolution is trying to put an end to the outrageous inequality that has always been the scourge of our countries. Through shameless fraud, manipulation and murder, he gradually becomes the uncontested authority in the town, but all his money and his power are useless against the capricious hand of death that continuously denies him any morsel of happiness. One character defines him as "living rancor," and that sentiment takes hold of him until nothing else remains.

Of many classics of literature it has been said that they can't be adapted to cinema. Curiously, the numerous jumps in the narration of Pedro Páramo, from past to present and from one narrator to another, feel ready-made for the screen. The Netflix adaptation follows almost exactly the sequence in which the text is written, and that structure, full of abrupt breaks, which in book form demands constant attention and effort from the reader, lends itself to the audiovisual medium with surprising ease. (Rulfo also wrote movie scripts, so maybe he had a sense of the possibilities of scene cuts when writing his novel.)

Precisely because the movie didn't need to add more technical embellishments to a text that was itself quite complex, some Anglo reviewers have reported feeling left unimpressed by it, describing it as too long and not experimental enough for its source material. My suspicion is that they watched the movie in its lackluster English dub instead of the powerful dialogues of the original Spanish, most of them taken verbatim from the novel. I'm not surprised to find that, where English media have assigned this movie to a Hispanic reviewer, its reception has been more favorable. The languid, understated tone is part of the point. The trip to Comala is a descent into hell, and when these ghosts speak, they have much to lament. You can get bored with Pedro Páramo if you're not intimately familiar with the way the real and the unreal are experienced by Latin Americans. The generational shock of colonization and the repeated shocks of subsequent civil wars built a collective mindset where no assumptions are guaranteed, where things can crumble down at any moment and the most delicate beauty coexists with utter terror. You don't need fancy CGI to tell our stories. Our mundane, common lives are already full of the impossible.

Director Rodrigo Prieto masterfully communicates the intensity of the events in Pedro Páramo with vivid colors and stark chiaroscuros. The result is a slow-paced account of a life of frustrated desires painted with heightened accents. Nothing much seems to happen while a tempest of emotions roars under the surface. That's the tension in the heart of a Mexican macho, who is expected to show at all times a hard face that nothing can move, even as his unacknowledged feelings eat him alive. Here's where we can notice the ace up the sleeve of this movie: Gustavo Santaolalla's monumental soundtrack, at the same time unobtrusive and ominous, matching the all-consuming resentment and fury that hide in the ordinary flow of everyday moments.

This production lives up to the thorny responsibility of adapting a national epic. Many classics of Latin American literature took upon themselves the task of expressing an entire country in a book. To get a feel for the soul of Argentina, you read Martín Fierro. To get a feel for the soul of Colombia, you read One Hundred Years of Solitude. That's the position that Pedro Páramo occupies for Mexico. And the many souls trapped between the empty houses of Comala tell of a land mercilessly punished by men's ambitions, a land that resonates with the clamor of a very old pain that still hasn't found peace, a land where the melancholy of memories finds some comfort each time someone listens to them.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Area X gets weirder (and more male-driven) in Jeff VanderMeer’s fourth installment, the prequel Absolution.

I’m a big fan of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014). I’ve presented on it at conferences, taught Annihilation multiple times, and wrote a dissertation chapter on the trilogy. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these books—perhaps too much time to accurately write a review of the fourth book, Absolution, so do with that what you will. Also, there will be light spoilers for the trilogy. 

The original trilogy explores a place on the Florida coast called Area X through multiple characters and points of view. Area X is a transitional environment where things that enter it do not remain the same (to put it mildly), with sometimes horrific results. The Southern Reach is a quasi-governmental agency created to control (or defeat) Area X and try to figure out what exactly is going on. By the end of the trilogy, it’s clear Area X cannot be contained.

Ten years later, VanderMeer has released Absolution, which takes place before Area X becomes the infamous location of the trilogy. Like the environment that VanderMeer has released this prequel into, much has changed—including VanderMeer as a writer. His more direct works (which is perhaps a misnomer) such as Finch (2009) and Southern Reach trilogy have been replaced with more dense, circular stories that give up linearity for the weird. While VanderMeer has always been part of the new weird, his later novels, such as Dead Astronauts (2019), really lean into the weird in terms of structure and prose. I wondered how he would approach this change in his style when it came to returning to Area X or if he would double down on his current style. He chose the latter, so while the novel doesn’t read quite the same as the original trilogy, it retains the weirdness.

Much of Absolution is told from the point of view of Old Jim, who owned the bar in the town on the Forgotten Coast in the original trilogy. In the prequel, we learn Old Jim was sent there by Central in an operation to see what was going on with the strange things happening on the Forgotten Coast (which becomes Area X). Old Jim has a rambling, near stream of consciousness style that makes for a dense, rich reading experience. He’s also an unreliable narrator, which adds another layer of weirdness to what is actually going on in the Forgotten Coast as it is difficult to discern what is trauma from Old Jim’s decades as an operative and what is actually something bizarre happening. Old Jim is obsessed with the Dead Town expedition, an early group of biologists that mirror the later expeditions into Area X in the original trilogy. He scours Central’s archives for notes from the biologists’ journals for clues of what actually happened before being deployed to the Forgotten Coast.  

Without dipping into spoilers, there is a time jump to a later point in the Area X timeline, with the story told from the point of view of Lowry, an unlikeable drug-obsessed and “fuck”-addled member of the first expedition into Area X (and a character from the original trilogy). Much like Old Jim’s section, the writing is dense and fully stream of consciousness with an intense amount of profanity that adds to the difficulty of reading the prose out of pure stuttering repetition. 

As these two sections suggest, the book is much more character driven and focused on the voices of these characters as opposed to uncovering the mystery of Area X, as in the original trilogy. The other main character is Cass, another Central agent who works with Old Jim to discover what is going. She is a spy but also a lookalike for his missing daughter, and the two become conflated for him as she becomes a surrogate for his daughter—not just his colleague. Her character felt most like a callback to some of the multi-dimensional women who populated the original trilogy, such as the Biologist.

Perhaps because this book functions as a prequel, there are very few answers in its pages. Much of the book is simply weird in the unique ways that VanderMeer explores the weird. What surprised me about this addition to the Southern Reach was the focus on the human. While the place of the Forgotten Coast and Area X are certainly important characters to this novel, the human voices are overwhelming in their narrative style. VanderMeer’s trilogy of 2014 had clear parallels to how environmental thinkers were engaging with the climate crisis, which has led to the 2014 trilogy being on many environmental and climate-focused reading lists and syllabi, mine included. In Absolution, the environmental commentary is much less clear cut. Some of this change comes from the characters. In this book, we don’t have a biologist point of view character to comment on the transitional environments or how humanity is impacting different species. Rather, these two men, Old Jim and Lowry, are infected with their jobs (and in Lowry’s case, drugs) as much as by Area X, which is supported by referencing Dr. Alison Sperling’s theoretical work on the body in the novel’s acknowledgements. 

While weirdness for the sake of weirdness might be enough for some people, it wasn’t for me. Then again, I’ve spent a lot of time in Area X. If you preferred reading about the Biologist (from Annihilation) and Ghost Bird (from Acceptance), then Absolution might leave you feeling hollow. If book two, Authority, was your favorite of the original trilogy, then you will most likely enjoy this prequel that investigates these disintegrating human systems in all their toxic weirdness.

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Reference: VanderMeer, Jeff. Absolution [MCD, 2024].

Posted by: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.

An argument about the Roman Empire that masquerades as a time travel into a alternate history novel.

It’s not often that one finds that the end of the book is what a reader might consider reading first. Usually an afterword of a book is best read in the aftermath of the book, when the reader’s thoughts can gel and coalesce and get a peek behind the curtain. It has happened, though, that said peek behind the curtain feels like it is oddly placed, that it should be in a foreword, or if it was a standalone piece altogether. Or, that the afterward and its arguments is the dog, and the book is the tail.