The Friday the 13th prequel series, Crystal Lake, is still set to scare its way onto Peacock even though Bryan Fuller will no longer be showrunning the project.
We first found out about the project back in late 2022, with Fuller steadfastly attached. Fuller, however, went to Twitter X yesterday and shared: “For reasons beyond our control, A24 has elected to go a different way with the material. We hope the final product will be something Friday the 13th fans all over the world will enjoy.”
“Adapting classic horror is something I have some experience with,” Fuller wrote in an earlier threaded tweet. “These shows require a vision that elevates and transforms, as well as delivers what audiences have come to expect, which is an ambitious and risky endeavor. It requires people to take the leap with me.”
It’s clear that Fuller is implying that A24 and Peacock weren’t willing to take a similar leap with Crystal Lake, a recurrent theme, it seems, for Fuller, who left Star Trek: Discovery soon after co-creating it as well as the show American Gods after the first season.
One of his shows that definitely took a leap and was rewarded for it was Hannibal, which Fuller was clear to point out on X as well. “When it works, as with HANNIBAL, the results can be powerful for the storytellers and the audience,” he wrote. “I couldn’t be more proud of the work my co-showrunner Jim Danger Gray and I were able to accomplish with our brilliant writing staff despite the challenges we faced.”
Despite Fuller exiting Crystal Lake, the series, per Entertainment Weekly, is still moving ahead, although a new showrunner has yet to be announced. The show is able to leverage events from the first Friday the 13th film, although not its sequels, which means that the hockey-wearing Jason Voorhees is off-limits (although the young, sweet boy named Jason who dies in the lake remains in play).
What this means for the actual story of the upcoming show remains to be seen, especially given the creative turnover. Time will tell where the horror series ends up, though it will still likely end up streaming on Peacock in the next few years. [ed note: As for Fuller, he's still at work on hisfeature film debut, Dust Bunny, which is set to star Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian, and Mads Mikkelsen—so we know Hideo Kojima will be seated.] [end-mark]
It’s time for Wee Mad Arthur to find his people. It's a great retcon, in fairness.
Summary
Tiffany and Mrs. Proust come upon the Feegle, who have found Roland and his fiancée and soon-to-be mother-in-law in a pub. The Feegle have caused such a ruckus that the Watch have been summoned. The eyeless man appears and Roland becomes suspicious of Tiffany when she tells him of his father’s death. Carrot tells Tiffany that he’s arresting her because he cannot arrest Feegle, and Angus takes Tiffany and Mrs. Proust to the cells to keep them safe. Tiffany and Mrs. Proust argue, and the older woman slaps Tiffany; they realize that they’re being affected by the eyeless figure too, that perhaps it is responsible for creating anti-witch sentiments whenever they erupt—a new problem that sprung from Tiffany kissing the winter. Mrs. Proust tells Tiffany that there’s someone she needs to speak to, who will find her when the time is right. Watchman Wee Mad Arthur finds the Feegle and admits that he was raised by gnomes, but they found him as a baby: Turns out he’s a Feegle too. Tiffany and Mrs. Proust wake in the morning and Constable Haddock tells them he’s been advised to let them go with a warning, and that Commander Vimes has ordered that the Feegle be out of the city by sundown; they caused such a stir that the King’s Head pub has been turned back to front.
Tiffany and Mrs. Proust head to the pub formerly known as the King’s Head to find Commander Vimes displeased with the current turn of events. Mrs. Proust suggests that the pub be renamed the King’s Neck (rather than the more incendiary King’s Back), and the eyeless figure reemerges. Tiffany is dropped down into the sewers and follows a voice who tells her to keep up. She turns out to be Eskarina Smith, who has brought Tiffany to the Unreal Estate to tell her that the eyeless figure is the Cunning Man—a creature born of an ancient story, who used to be a witch hunter in the name of Om and was killed by a witch he fell in love with because she saw the darkness in him and pulled him into the fire with her. She tells Tiffany that she will have to be ready to be taken over by the Cunning Man and outwit him. Tiffany realizes that she’s in the presence of the only woman who became a wizard, but no sooner has she figured this out then Eskarina’s massive shamble breaks and she tells Tiffany to take her broom and make a run for it. Tiffany gets home with the Feegle (and Wee Mad Arthur, who’s come along), and finds human guards at the Feegle mound, one with a shovel. Tiffany tells the Feegles not to kill anyone while she sorts this.
Sergeant Brian tells Tiffany that they’re here on the Baron’s orders, and they’re to retrieve Amber, who the people believe was “given” to the Feegles. Tiffany reminds him that she is the granddaughter of Granny Aching, who would never allow this, and has his men lay down their weapons, asking Rob to fetch up Amber, who doesn’t want to leave at all. Jeannie tells Tiffany that Amber learned the soothing songs, and that she’s as close to a kelda as a human can get. Tiffany goes and speaks to Roland, who asks if she killed his father and stole money from him, which Tiffany insists she did not. She tells Roland that she is taking Amber home with her for now. Tiffany has a dream where she’s on fire but it doesn’t hurt. She talks to Amber about her young man, who is a tailor. When she goes to the castle the next day, Letitia’s mother the Duchess is so horrible that Tiffany winds up talking back to her. The Duchess tries to get Tiffany thrown in the dungeon, but Preston, the newest guard won’t do it, and is too clever by a half in any case. The castle cook believes that she saw frogs in her boiling pot and accuses Tiffany of killing the old baron to keep Roland for herself. The woman is drunk, and in her ranting, she falls into the cellar and dies.
Roland tells Tiffany she must leave the Chalk while the Duchess watches the proceedings. Tiffany points out that Roland isn’t actually accusing her of anything, just suggesting things in connection with her, and she demands a hearing of her peers. The guards are told to lock up Tiffany’s broomstick, but Tiffany locks herself in the dungeon, telling the Feegle to bring Toad in to discuss her legal counsel. Later on, Letitia comes to see her, sobbing, and Roland and the Duchess appear, assuming that Tiffany is trying to lure the young woman to her. Tiffany makes a joke about keeping spinning wheels away from her, prompting a fight between Roland and the Duchess because she wants all of them burned, but Roland’s mother used to spin and he won’t let anyone touch her wheel. Tiffany lets Brian know that she will escape the dungeon, but be back in the morning. She goes to Letitia’s room because she could tell the young woman was trying to apologize to her: She is the one who cast the spell that made everyone turn against Tiffany because she worried about how close Tiffany was to Roland. Tiffany can’t understand why the spell worked because she got it out of a fake book, but when Letitia raises a hedge stick into the air, there’s blue light…
Commentary
Well, it only took over two decades and over two dozen Discworld books between, but we finally learn what became of Eskarina Smith.
It’s sad, but in a way it could only ever be sad, couldn’t it? Esk’s story didn’t have much bearing on the way this world unfolded, which means that she’s not here at the forefront, bringing more women into wizardry as everyone thought she might. Simon also didn’t change the face of magic as the world knew it. I’d say that’s disappointing, but I’m frankly impressed by how true-to-life it turned out, completely by the accident of all the rest of the Discworld books—the suggestion is that Simon’s brilliance came with a great deal of deterioration, and that Esk basically took care of him until he was gone. She has a great font of knowledge that can really only be understood by her. She’s older and she’s time traveling and she’s experiencing everything at once. As Tiffany notes, “that somehow she was everywhere else at the same time.”
Which means that after giving Esk some time as the King Arthur of her own tale, learning to be animals from Granny, she has looped all the way back onto being Merlin herself. Living all of time at once and deeply disconnected due to that. Do I think that it’s interesting how Merlin’s difficulty with time seems to closely resemble dementia or Alzheimer’s? I sure do. Do I think it’s relevant that Pratchett brought Esk back at a point when he himself would have been feeling the effects of that disease? Absolutely.
A thing that hit me this time around: Eskarina talks about how one of the people who might let the Cunning Man in is “some girl who is wearing quite dangerous cult symbols without an inkling of what they really mean.” And then, naturally, she turns out to be right because that’s precisely what Letitia did, though Letitia had a much more active desire to understand magic. Which in turn can only make me think of how many people do this without putting thought into it at all.
Obviously, I’m not saying that makes it okay to try and “catch out” teenage girls wearing band shirts because you think that they don’t know enough music to be “real fans” (please stop doing this). But I do remember the point in my childhood when I would wear/display anything that I liked the look of, and finally reaching the point where I realized how thoughtless or even dangerous that could be. Everything is imbued with meaning, and while it’s fine to enjoy things for aesthetic purposes, it’s wild to notice how many people simply don’t want to move deeper than the vibes level.
The number of times that people in this book try to tell Tiffany to simply throw Amber back to her family is important. Obviously, the choice should only ever be Amber’s, but when there’s pressure, Tiffany almost caves to it for the sake of appearing reasonable. Which leads to the book really coming for the nuclear-family-as-a-given premise when Tiffany then thinks of how Granny Weatherwax always says that evil comes from treating people like things:
And right now it would happen if you thought there was a thing called a father, and a thing called a mother, and a thing called a daughter, and a thing called a cottage, and told yourself that if you put them all together you had a thing called a happy family.
That. That right there. That belief that anyone from a remotely dysfunctional family knows generates abuse and sometimes far worse. Amber is lucky to be alive, and if Tiffany assumes that the nature of family is a thing that just exists—not a choice that people must actively make—she is enabling evil. That is what the story is saying.
This section of the story is also endeavoring to explain how Roland and Tiffany never came to be, after a few of these books that suggested they might. And I love the framing because it’s an age-old thing: believing they were meant to be together because they were both different and mistaking that for being alike. Being two relative outsiders of differing genders who want to hang out is always going to get the neighborhood talking, silly as that is. Tiffany’s hurt at not recognizing it sooner is both fair and inevitable—she was too busy to notice, but noticing is what she’s supposed to do. Of course she’s sore about it.
But at least she’s finally arrived at the point where she can start sorting things through.
Asides and little thoughts
Carrot coming in there wanting to know what the Feegles are doing in his city, sounds like someone has taken his work dad’s lessons to heart.
This, as far as I can recall, is the first time that Vimes has been unequivocally described as “tall” and I won’t accept it. He just looks tall to Tiffany, who is very short, and that’s the story I’m sticking to. I’m not saying that Vimes is as small as a dwarf, or even as short as Nobby, but he is not tall. Carrot is overly tall, Sybil is tall, Vimes is under tall. He’s middling. This is very important to me personally.
Miss Tick had said that Eskarina was the girl that got a wizard’s staff by mistake! This is an adorable trans joke. For sure. There’s no way that it’s not intended to be, with the exclamation point and all. And that’s without even getting into Eskarina talking about how she took that knob off her staff and it works better than way.
Pratchettisms
At this point Mrs. Proust took a pinch of snuff, at such speed and volume that Tiffany was surprised that it didn’t come out of her ears.
He looked like a cat on the day it rained mice.
“Wizards are like cats going to the toilet in that respect; once you’ve walked away from it, it isn’t there any more.”
And on that day, with a pocketful of charred stars, not knowing what it was she was doing, but determined to to do it, she had become a witch.
It was as if fire had just dropped in for a friendly visit, not for business. Its flames rustled.
There was a scream from the distant kitchen, and one thing that makes human different from animals is that they run towards a distress call, rather than away from it.
Roland was staring at Tiffany, so nonplussed he was nearly minused.
But the Duchess had no common sense, probably because it was, well, too common.
Did you see Pam & Tommy and enjoy the acting going on between actors Sebastian Stan and Lily James? If so, you’re in luck—the MCU’s Winter Soldier (pictured above) and the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Cinderellastar are teaming up once again.
The movie in question is titled Let the Evil Go West, which The Hollywood Reporter describes as a psychological thriller.
Here’s the synopsis, per THR:
Let the Evil Go West centers on a railroad worker who discovers a fortune under deeply disturbing circumstances. As horrifying visions and manifestations drive him toward madness, his wife becomes convinced that an evil presence has attached itself to their family.
We don’t have much more news about the film yet, other than it will be directed by Christian Tafdrup, whose previous credits include the 2022 Dutch film, Speak No Evil, which is getting an English-language adaptation starring James McAvoy. The script comes from someone named Xc Vs, and is produced by Tim and Trevor White at Star Thrower Entertainment, Mark Fasano and Nathan Klingher at Gramercy Park Media, and Allan Mandelbaum.
Time will tell who or what “evil presence” has attached itself to Stan’s character. Time will also tell whether this film is set in the past or contemporary times, as the brief description could go either way.
Whatever the case, it will be good to see Stan and James in another film together. [end-mark]
There’s a new animated series centered on the Caped Crusader coming our way. Today, Prime Video shared some first look images and announced the premiere date for Batman: Caped Crusader, which is being billed as a reimagining of the Batman mythology.
The series has some big names behind it, including J.J. Abrams, The Batman’sMatt Reeves, and Bruce Timm.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Welcome to Gotham City, where the corrupt outnumber the good, criminals run rampant and law-abiding citizens live in a constant state of fear. Forged in the fire of tragedy, wealthy socialite Bruce Wayne becomes something both more and less than human—the BATMAN. His one-man crusade for justice attracts unexpected allies within the GCPD and City Hall, but his heroic actions spawn deadly, unforeseen ramifications.
Catwoman. Credit: Prime Video
We also got details on the characters in the show, replete with descriptions, which you can read below:
BATMAN - A cold, remorseless avenger of evil, seemingly more machine than man. Forged in the fire of tragedy, every fiber of his being is dedicated to the eradication of crime.
BRUCE WAYNE - To the public at large, Bruce Wayne is a shallow dilettante, apparently wasting his parents’ vast fortune on frivolous pursuits and hedonistic pleasures. In fact, he’s an elaborate facade, carefully constructed to divert attention from his activities as Batman.
SELINA KYLE / “CATWOMAN” - Selena Kyle is a blithe and pampered heiress whose family lost their fortune after her father was imprisoned for embezzlement. Despite having the silver spoon yanked from her mouth, Selina refuses to quit living in the lap of luxury and becomes Catwoman as a “fun” way to maintain her lavish lifestyle.
DR. HARLEEN QUINZEL / “HARLEY QUINN” - Despite a personable and bubbly demeanor, Dr. Harleen Quinzel is a brilliant psychiatrist who treats some of Gotham’s elite. However, as Harley Quinn, she is a different person, entirely. A creepy, quiet, calculating menace who secretly dispenses her twisted justice to the truly despicable among her elite clientele.
Clayface. Credit: Prime Video
COMMISSIONER JIM GORDON - Former beat cop close to retirement, Gordon was hired to play along with the corrupt system and run out the clock till he can draw a pension. But they’ve sorely underestimated Jim Gordon. His unassailable character brings him into conflict with dirty cops and crooked politicians, alike. Not to mention, he has to reckon with a deranged vigilante beating up Gotham’s criminals.
CLAYFACE - Thanks to his “unique” facial features, screen actor Basil Karlo has been forever typecast as a B-movie heavy. Frustrated by the limitations his appearance put on both his career and personal life (he fell hopelessly in love with his co-star), Karlo turned to an experimental serum that promised to change his face. However, not only does this serum ultimately disfigure his face, but it ruptures the last of his sanity -- creating the tragic, vengeance seeking villain, Clayface.
These character descriptions sound... familiar. I'll be curious to see how reimagined they are when all ten episodes of Batman: Caped Crusader will premiere on Prime Video on August 1, 2024.
Check out some more first look images below. [end-mark]
Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne. Credit: Prime VideoDr. Harleen Quinzel. Credit: Prime VideoHarley Quinn. Credit: Prime VideoCommissioner Jim Gordon. Credit: Prime Video
Paramount Pictures wants you to experience the day the world went quiet, whether you were seeking that entertainment experience or not. That’s the premise ofA Quiet Place: Day One, the prequel to the two Quiet Place movies that came out in 2018 and 2021 respectively.
For those of you who are blessed with ignorance about this franchise, the premise is that Earth is attacked by aliens who attack anything (or just humans in particular, maybe, the logic doesn’t quite work) who makes a sound. The first two films take place several months after the initial invasion, but Day One starts out the day they first invade. In it, we follow Lupita Nyong’o’s character, Samira, as she and her cat try to survive the attack. We see in the trailer that she eventually teams up with a guy named Eric (Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn) as they try to stay alive and leave Manhattan.
The trailer also gives us a lot of visuals of the aliens in question, who look like a cross between a giant spider and the creatures from Stranger Things. We also see the characters whispering a lot, which we know isn’t quite quiet enough for these extraterrestrials, but I digress.
Michael Sarnoski (Pig) directed the film and wrote the screenplay for Day One. The story comes from him and John Krasinski, who starred in and directed the first two films. Michael Bay, Andrew Form, Brad Fuller, and Krasinski serve as producers. In addition to Nyong’o and Quinn, Day One stars Alex Wolff and Djimon Hounsou.
A Quiet Place: Day One premieres in theaters on June 28, 2024.
Where’s Gollum? Has anyone seen Gollum? Warner Bros. Discovery was certainly looking for him (or, more precisely, a way to cash in on their The Lord of the Rings' intellectual property rights).
Today, during the corporation’s first-quarter earnings conference call (via The Hollywood Reporter), CEO David Zaslav announced that New Line and Warner Bros. Pictures are in the “early stages of script development” for a LOTR movie tentatively titled Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum and is eying the film to come out sometime in 2026.
There are, of course, six existing features set in the fantastical world that J.R.R. Tolkien created—the three Lord of the Rings films and the three Hobbit films, all of which were spearheaded by Peter Jackson. For those having feelings about a LOTR film without Jackson being involved, I’ve got news for you: According to Zaslav, Jackson and his writing partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens “will be involved every step of the way” in the upcoming film, with Boyens and Walsh penning the script.
For those wondering if this Gollum movie will be a one-and-done endeavor, I have more news for you: Jackson et al signed a two-film deal with Warner Bros., so the odds are very good that this is only the first of many additional LOTR movies coming our way.
“It is an honor and a privilege to travel back to Middle-earth with our good friend and collaborator, Andy Serkis, who has unfinished business with that stinker—Gollum!,” Jackson, Boyens and Walsh said in a statement. “As life long fans of Professor Tolkien’s vast mythology, we are proud to be working with [Warner Bros. Discovery film execs] Mike De Luca, Pam Abdy and the entire team at Warner Bros. on another epic adventure!”
Serkis, who of course played Gollum in the previous films, also expressed his excitement about the project in the same statement: “Yesssss, Precious. The time has come once more to venture into the unknown with my dear friends, the extraordinary and incomparable guardians of Middle-earth Peter, Fran and Philippa. With Mike and Pam, and the Warner Bros. team on the quest as well, alongside WETA and our film making family in New Zealand, it’s just all too delicious… .”
[ed. note: if it's not too forward of us, we have a suggestion for Mr. Serkis that can be best communicated via a reference to The Simpsons:]
Image: 20th Century Fox
The movies, of course, are completely separate from the Prime Video series that Amazon has developed, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. We’ve also seen Gollum recently in a much-maligned video game, but here’s to opening this upcoming film will be more entertaining to experience. [end-mark]
First mentioned as a throwaway “other nasty empire” in a few TNG episodes here and there, we finally saw one in DS9’s “Indiscretion,” where they were pretty much just generic bad guys who looked like Leia’s disguise in Return of the Jedi. Later, DS9 had the Breen enter the Dominion War on the side of the Dominion, but even there, they were just a plot device—something to make it clear that the Cardassians were just one of many species subsumed to the Dominion and that the Gamma Quadrant empire would do whatever was necessary to win and expand.
But we’ve never once gotten any sense of what the Breen are, or who they are. Supposedly, that was the point, that they were mysterious, wearing their encounter suits all the time and such. To me, though, it just felt like they were a plot device—and a cheap one, at that, because the fact that they don’t have comprehensible dialogue means you can just hire extras to play them and not pay them as much. (Given that pretty much every episode of the last two years of DS9 had guest-star lists longer than one’s proverbial arm, you can see why they wanted to cut corners, but still.)
Both “Mirrors” two weeks ago and “Erigah” this week make an attempt to finally change that, to give us some genuine insight into the Breen.
And, well, they’re still not interesting.
Credit: CBS / Paramount+
Folks in the comments of “Mirrors” pointed out that having the Breen be just another set of Forehead Aliens is disappointing, having expressed hope that they might be more complicated than that. As an example, author David Mack—who, full disclosure, is a close friend of your humble reviewer—established in the Typhon Pact novel Zero Sum Game that there are multiple species in the Breen Confederacy, and that “Breen” is a culture, not a species. Dave did this by way of explaining the contradictory facts that had been established about the Breen. (Indeed, Dave’s notion is still compatible with what’s been revealed on Discovery so far, since L’ak and L’ak’s uncle remain the only Breen we’ve seen without the encounter suit.)
But the Breen culture we get is one of factions all vying for power, and didn’t we already do this with the Klingons in season one? And L’ak is important because he’s a scion of the royal family, so we get yet another alien species that has futuristic technology alongside medieval notions like primogeniture and the political importance of genetics and bloodlines over more relevant criteria, and bleah. It’s been done before and nothing interesting is done with it here.
On top of that, we get some other tired clichés here, including one of my least favorite: Incompetent Starfleet Security. Moll moves to escape sickbay after L’ak distracts everyone by overdosing on tricordrazine. (How the super-duper 32nd-century technology can allow a patient to possibly overdose themselves is left as an exercise for the viewer. Especialy since it winds up killing him.) The two nameless security guards are taken out in nothing flat, and then Culber tries to stop her and he actually does better than the trained security personnel, mostly because he's an opening-credits regular and therefore a bigger badass than the trained security personnel. Sigh.
I do like that Moll isn’t really able to get anywhere on the ship because even she’s not that good. And it’s good to see Rachael Ancheril back as Nhan in charge of the security detail holding Moll and L’ak.
Credit: CBS / Paramount+
Okay, I’ve spent almost 600 words dissing the Breen and this episode, so I should probably at this point mention that I generally actually liked this one. In particular, I enjoyed the negotiating done by T’Rina, aided by Vance, Burnham, and Rayner. T’Rina is the one doing it because Rillak is elsewhere and so she delegates it to Ni’Var’s president. By the way, this makes absolutely no sense. It was established back in “The Galactic Barrier” that Rillak has a vice president who would be in charge in her absence. But I’m willing to accept it because Tara Rosling just kills it in this episode, and her steel and her logic and her resolve are all magnificent.
Anyhow, we get some more background on Rayner, as we find out that one of the Breen factions subjugated the Kellerun people a while back, and Rayner was under their power. But it also means he knows a lot about how that faction works, and they’re able to use his knowledge to convince the Breen standing in front of them that they’ve negotiated with another faction to turn L’ak over.
In the end, Moll convinces the Breen that she’s L’ak’s wife—and they have the tattoos to prove it!—and is therefore part of the royal family now, plus she has information about the Progenitor technology. The Federation agrees to let the Breen have Moll in exchange for the Breen’s incredibly big ship not opening fire. (Burnham and Rayner saw a possible future with Federation HQ destroyed by the Breen in “Face the Strange,” and so everyone’s priority is, understandably, to avoid letting the shooting start.)
Now it’s a race. Moll doesn’t have any of the physical evidence or clues, but she has knowledge, and now a big-ass Breen ship. Starfleet has the Romulan notebook, most of the puzzle pieces, and a ship with a spore drive.
The B-plot is more of what Discovery does best, which is figure shit out. Tilly and Adira discover that the piece of metal that they found last week is, basically, a library call slip. Back in the 23rd century, Reno was part of a gaggle of rare-book enthusiasts who kept things in a traveling library. It’s still around nine centuries later, and Reno doesn’t know anyone connected to it now, obviously, but it’s enough to get them moving in the right direction.
Credit: CBS / Paramount+
Something Discovery has continued to excel at is intense discussions, negotiations, debates, whether it’s Osyraa and Vance in “There is a Tide…” or the grand debate about how to approach Species 10C in “…But to Connect” or the T’Kal-in-ket in “Unification III.” T’Rina’s negotiations with the Breen live up to that standard, and it’s beautifully done, making the climax of the episode far more intense than a shooting war would be. (And if you desperately need action, there’s Moll’s escape.)
Next week, it looks like we’re back to the chase for the Progenitors’ tech. Cha cha cha.[end-mark]
There is no lack of zombie movie fare in the world, but if the trailer for the Norwegian film Handling the Undead is any indication, the movie brings an arthouse feel to the genre and has a strong possibility of quietly wrecking you as you watch.
The film is based on an eponymous novel by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist, who also penned the script in collaboration with director Thea Hvistendahl. The trailer introduces three people who have inexplicably come back from the dead in the capital of Norway, and the ramifications that has for those who love and grieve them.
Here’s the more detailed, official synopsis for Handling the Undead:
On a hot summer day in Oslo, the dead mysteriously awaken, and three families are thrown into chaos when their deceased loved ones come back to them. Who are they, and what do they want? A family is faced with the mother’s reawakening before they have even mourned her death after a car accident; an elderly woman gets the love of her life back the same day she has buried her; a grandfather rescues his grandchild from the gravesite in a desperate attempt to get his daughter out of her depression. Handling the Undead is a drama with elements of horror about three families, a story about grief and loss, but also about hope and understanding of what we can’t comprehend or control.
Handling the Undead stars Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Bjørn Sundquis, Bente Børsum, Bahar Pars, and Inesa Dauksta. It premiered at the Sundance Festival this January, after which Neon picked up the U.S. distribution rights. It will premiere here at the IFC Center in New York City on May 31, 2024 and at select theaters after that on June 7, 2024.
We're thrilled to share an excerpt from Hana Lee's gritty debut fantasy novel Road to Ruin, out from Saga Press on May 14th.
Jin-Lu has the most dangerous job in the wasteland. She’s a magebike courier, one of the few who venture outside the domed cities on motorcycles powered by magic. Every day, she braves the wasteland’s dangers—deadly storms, roving marauders, and territorial beasts—to deliver her wares.
Her most valuable cargo? A prince’s love letters addressed to Yi-Nereen, a princess desperate to escape the clutches of her abusive family and soon-to-be husband. Jin, desperately in love with both her and the prince, can’t refuse Yi-Nereen’s plea for help. The two of them flee across the wastes, pursued by Yi-Nereen’s furious father, her scheming betrothed, and a bounty hunter with mysterious powers.
A storm to end all storms is brewing and dark secrets about the heritability of magic are coming to light. Jin’s heart has led her into peril before, but this time she may not find her way back.
Chapter One
ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
Second Age of Storms, 51st Summer, Day 20
The pteropter came shrieking out of the hot blue sky like mana lightning, hell-bent on ruining Jin’s day. Time didn’t do her the courtesy of slowing down. One second she was roaring down the wasteland highway on her magebike, and the next, a demented flying beast had its claws in her shoulder. Right down to the bone, like the leather was nothing.
Jin yelped and twisted, which was exactly the wrong thing to do. The handlebars jerked. The bike shuddered beneath her. Wings flapped in her face as she fought to regain control. Then the front wheel hit a rock or a pothole or some stupid shit like that, and the next thing Jin knew, she was sailing through the air.
She hit the ground headfirst, flipped a couple of times, and finally skidded to a rest on her side. Not dead was her first hazy thought. Then: That depends. What about the bike?
She didn’t dare look. Instead she lay there, battered and breathless, imagining the worst: a shredded, smoking heap of metal in a pool of bright blue mana. A scrapped magebike in the middle of the wastes was a death sentence.
First things first: Were her bones broken? Was her skull intact? Could she move?
Thank Rasvel for her bonehelm, carved from a saurian’s skull and tougher than steel. She’d rattled her head around good, but she could still think and she wasn’t seeing double. Her throat itched for a mana-cig. Good sign, probably. She confirmed her limbs were working by reaching into her breast pocket for a pack, only to find it empty. Right—she was trying to quit.
Finally she made herself look. Relief made her dizzy. The magebike was all right; it lay on its side in the dust, still bike shaped, smoking slightly. The sight lent Jin the strength to push herself upright, then to her feet. Goddamn, her shoulder hurt.
Jin glared at the reason she’d crashed. The pteropter was thrashing weakly on the ground next to the magebike. Just a little one, small enough to fit in her bonehelm. Jin limped closer and it screeched, reedy and thin. One of its four leathery wings dragged in the dirt, white bone poking through a mess of violet saurian blood. Beady eyes glared from the triangular head, above a beak lined with sharp teeth.
“Don’t look at me.” Jin heaved her bike upright and braced the kickstand on the cracked, pitted surface of the highway. “I was minding my own business. You’re the one who tried to kill me.”
The pteropter made a miserable keening sound and fell silent. Jin snuck a glance. The little saurian wasn’t dead; its three unhurt wings were twitching, like it wanted to take flight. Clearly that wasn’t going to happen.
Jin looked back in the direction she’d come. Air shimmered above the highway, hot and dry. Gravelly sand undulated and heaved as far as the eye could see, an infinite expanse broken only by the skyward-reaching teeth of a rock outcropping or the lone many-armed figure of a cactus. The wasteland wasn’t featureless and flat the way city dwellers described, but even Jin had to admit there wasn’t much out here to look at.
Except that.
Above the western horizon churned the crackling fog of a mana storm. Kerina Sol, her starting point, would have already closed its dome in preparation. Gales of wind and blasts of lightning would batter the city’s shield, testing the limits of the shieldcasters who closed ranks to keep it raised. Jin could imagine the faint blue hum of the shield even if she couldn’t see it from this distance. Everyone in the city would be safe from the storm so long as the shieldcasters held; only outriders like Jin were in trouble.
Likely the little pteropter wouldn’t survive once the storm came this way. Even if it did, the wasteland sun would bake it to death—if its own kind didn’t peck it apart first.
“Not my problem.” Jin took off her helm and checked it for cracks. The bone hadn’t even chipped. She hesitated, grinding her teeth, and the pteropter had the nerve to let loose a sad chirp that tugged at her heartstrings. “I said, not my… Ugh.”
It was her problem, the way sick cats and kids in rags had always been her problem. The wasteland was meant to be her guilt-free zone, a lawless desert where the only person Jin had to worry about was herself.
Not fair.
What could she even do to help, anyway? She didn’t have anywhere to pack an injured pteropter. Jin glanced at her tank satchel and saddlebags, which were stuffed with expensive—and, for the most part, illegal—goods, including one love letter signed in swooping royal cursive and sealed with rose-scented wax. Prince Kadrin probably wouldn’t appreciate pteropter bloodstains on his latest romantic missive.
That left her bonehelm. Fuck.
Jin knelt beside the pteropter and held out her hand, slow and careful. You are an idiot, she reminded herself. It’s a miracle you’ve survived this long. The pteropter eyed her hand and clacked its toothy beak. Jin winced in anticipation.
“Easy, now—ow, ouch, goddamn fuck—”
She lifted the pteropter—its beak clamped down on her gloved palm—and stuffed it into the helm. Then she tore off her jacket and wrapped it hastily around the helm, fashioning a bulky sling. Finally she hung the cursed parcel on her handlebars and stepped back, panting.
The parcel shrieked. A sharp beak poked out from one of the orbital openings on the bonehelm and emitted a scratchy hiss. Jin massaged her shoulder.
“I’m gonna call you Screech.”
She straddled her magebike, worked her hands over the textured grips, and inhaled, long and slow. Power rose from the dwindling store of mana in her blood, a simmer in her veins. It pooled in her hands until the heat grew almost unbearable—then a spark crackled between her fingers and danced over her knuckles.
Jin braced herself for the magebike’s familiar roar, the blissful rumble of the engine between her knees. Nothing happened. Trapped in Jin’s helm, the pteropter let out another screech.
“No,” Jin said. “No, no, no.”
She burned more mana. Sparks flew. Her hands grew hot and slippery, but the magebike made no sound.
Jin swore, hopped off the bike, and scanned the exposed machinery under the engine block. The crash must have knocked something loose. Where had that smoke come from?
“Oh Rasvel, not the engine. Please not the engine.”
Jin pressed her forehead against the warm leather saddle and breathed in, then out. Her throat ached for the cool smoke of a mana-cig. She kept them stashed in her saddlebags now, too far to reach for one on a whim.
The sky darkened. Out west, the mana storm had barreled over Kerina Sol without breaking stride and was bearing down on her position. Bolts of blue and violet lightning stabbed down through boiling black clouds; a clap of furious thunder followed each flash. Closer together now. Much too close.
Makela’s grasping fingers, she’d wasted too much time on the pteropter. If she didn’t get her bike going, she was toast.
Sweating, she bent over the engine. Jin was no mechanic, just a sparkrider, and she didn’t fully understand the bike’s internals. No one did, except the artificers who put the bikes together and kept them running. It was all based on Road Builder technology, science lost to the ages and rediscovered in bits and pieces by scavengers combing the wastes for old ruins.
Mana went in the magebike’s fuel tank and sparks went down the ignition line; that was the extent of Jin’s comprehension. The tank was still one-third full, and the ignition line was intact. So what now?
A distant roar caught her attention. Not the oncoming mana storm, and certainly not the magebike under her grease-stained hands. Jin tossed sweaty black hair out of her face and glanced north. Her blood froze.
Out in the haze rode a half-dozen bikes, shiny and chrome under the darkening sun. Tattered standards flew above the procession; bonehelms gleamed in the last remnants of daylight.
Wasteland raiders. Just her fucking luck.
They’d be on her in minutes. But what were they doing? Raiders went storm chasing, not storm fleeing. Sucking up the mana that pooled in a storm’s wake was a tenuous way to survive in the wasteland; riding along a storm front was a good way to die. Sure, they were sparkriders like Jin, so they might survive a few minutes in the storm—longer than anybody without the Talent. But there was just no goddamn reason.
Jin bent back to the engine and racked her limited knowledge of its workings. Sparks went down the copper wire connecting the grip to a metal box under the engine, which she’d heard mechanics call the mana regulator. Jin touched the regulator, and part of the metal shell came off in her hand, jagged and sharp.
Oh. That was probably it.
Shit. A busted mana regulator was one of the few things on her bike she knew how to replace, if she had the part. But out here in the wastes, still most of a day’s ride from her destination, she was fucked. Unless…
She could bypass the regulator. Send a spark straight down the intake. It was a stupid thing to do, just like riding without a helm. Even odds that the magebike would either cough back to life or blow to pieces and scramble Jin all over the highway like an egg.
What other options did she have? Sit here, let the raiders skin her and strip her bike for parts? Limping into the storm was probably a more merciful end.
“This is all your fault,” Jin growled at the pteropter dangling from her magebike’s handlebars. It warbled back, then tucked its beak under an uninjured wing and… went to sleep. How? How?
Jin swung her leg over her bike again. If she was going to die, at least she would die in a magebike engine explosion, which was honestly a pretty badass way to go. Her mother’s face flashed through her head, and Jin winced. Eomma would never forgive her for dying out here in the wastes without leaving a husband or wife or even a hush-hush lover to grieve. Organizing Jin’s poorly attended funeral was probably Eomma’s worst nightmare.
The thought made Jin’s throat itch for that mana-cig again. She reached awkwardly under the engine block for the intake. Bending over brought her to eye level with the leather satchel strapped to the fuel tank, and her heart skipped a beat.
The crash had damaged more than just the mana regulator. Something sharp had sliced open the satchel. Jin was looking at torn leather and empty space where a jewel-encrusted scroll tube should have been safely ensconced.
“Shit.”
When it came to cargo, Jin had three rules: no drugs, no poisons, no explosives. Those rules were her mother’s condition for taking any of the coin Jin made as a courier. They’d probably cost Jin thousands of mun over her career, which was frustrating, but she knew Eomma had her reasons. So Jin stuck to questionably legal but harmless goods: imported produce, herbal remedies and aphrodisiacs, the latest in sartorial fashions, and, on one memorable occasion, a live prizefighter rooster. It all added up to a decent but unreliable income stream.
The letter in that scroll tube was worth more than the rest of her cargo combined. Prince Kadrin and his stupid letters were the only reason Eomma had a bakery and Jin had a paid-off magebike. He was by far her best client.
Raiders roared in from the north. Mana lightning raged in the west. Jin hopped off her magebike yet again and scoured the road, heart hammering in her chest. The ancient highway was riddled with enough cracks to hide a legion of scroll tubes. The sunlight was fading fast. Jin’s breath came in short, desperate gasps.
There—a ruby glint under the failing sun. The tube was wedged into a deep crack, covered in dust and sporting a dent in its gold-embossed cap. Jin yanked it free, cringing as tiny gems popped off and went pinging over the asphalt. Oh well, they were Talentcrafted anyway. Kadrin could have someone replace them with the wave of a hand.
Jin could smell the storm now: a nose-hair-sizzling chemical tang. The raiders were gaining on her, too. Indigo smoke boiled from magebike exhausts as the riders’ eyes glowed hot orange, pulsing with the wax and wane of their Talent. Shit, Jin could see their eyes now—that wasn’t good at all.
Jin had a perfect track record of never having come face-to-face with a wasteland raider, thank you very much. And fuck if she was breaking that streak today.
She stuffed the scroll tube down her jacket and leaped onto her magebike. “Time to go!” she announced to the sleeping saurian swinging from her handlebars.
She thought about muttering a quick prayer to Rasvel before she shot sparks down her intake and blew herself into little Jin-flavored bits, but decided against it. Better if the Giver of Blessings didn’t watch her screw up. Jin had no intention of waking up Talentless in the next life.
Power rushed to her fingertips. The engine coughed and roared to life—and more importantly, didn’t explode.
“Fuck yes!”
She’d been born to be a sparkrider. She’d known it ever since she crested a dune for the first time and went sailing through the air on wings of steel and smoke. Her body and her bike were one, her home was the highway, and all that other sentimental crap.
She’d never had to tear ass on a magebike to escape a mana storm and a howling gang of raiders, though. At least, not at the same time.
Jin kicked off and fed the engine. It responded at once with a satisfying snarl and charged forward. She threw a glance over her shoulder just as the lead raider hopped the highway shoulder, swerved, and skidded to a squealing halt.
Jin’s heart leaped. The raiders weren’t going to chase her. They must have thought she’d make easy prey, stranded on the highway, but a sparkrider on the run was a different beast. Especially a courier, light and swift, unburdened by a knight’s steel and shield.
The lead raider took off her helm. Dirty-blonde hair stuck up in spikes from a tanned face that was already too distant for Jin to make out her features. The raider raised her hands.
Baffled, Jin kept stealing glances back even as she sped away. The other raiders peeled off into the wasteland, shrinking to little dots as the mana storm boiled closer. Jin still had no clue why they’d ventured so near the storm front; clearly they weren’t eager to face lightning. But the blonde raider stayed put, straddling her magebike and staring after Jin.
What was she doing? Rolling thunder and shrieking wind eclipsed all other sound; the sky bled blue to black. The storm was almost upon the raider.
Jin kept going. The last time she glanced back—right before the storm bore down on the faraway shape of magebike and rider—the nape of her neck prickled fiercely. Somehow, despite the distance, she knew the woman was smiling.
A tiny voice in Jin’s head asked, Don’t I know you?
Once upon a time, in the 1990s, there was a movie called Twister that was patently absurd, but also weirdly charming. Now, nearing 30 years later, there is a movie called Twisters that is not a sequel, nor a remake, but just another movie about people who really like to chase tornadoes. The film's tagline seems to be, "You don't face your fears. You ride 'em." This tagline makes me tired.
We now have our second trailer for Twisters, which is much like the first one, except with more buildup to the tornado that traumatizes Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and more chaotic tornado drama as the trailer (and presumably the film) progresses. Now there's a fire tornado! I would like to be into this, but every time a character opens their mouth, the film gets less appealing. She's a smarty-pants city girl! He (Glen Powell as Tyler Owens) is a good ol' boy with a lot of social media followers and his face on a T-shirt, and he does things the old way, no PhDs required!
The most intriguing part is that Kate might have figured out how to "disrupt" a tornado, but she done messed up last time.
Who but the good ol' boy to give her another chance?
Twisters is directed by Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) from a screenplay by Mark L. Smith (The Midnight Sky), with a nod to Michael Crichton, who co-wrote the first Twister. It also stars Brandon Perea (Nope), Sasha Lane (American Honey), Daryl McCormack (Peaky Blinders), Kiernan Shipka (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), Nik Dodani (Atypical) and Maura Tierney (Beautiful Boy). You can ride your fears right into the theater on July 19th.[end-mark]
First sasquatches, then space invaders. David and Nathan Zellner recently released Sasquatch Sunset, a very weird movie in which Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keogh starred as, yes, sasquatches; now, they're planning to follow it up with an alien invasion comedy starring Cate Blanchett as... well, I'm going to let Variety explain:
Alpha Gang follows alien invaders sent on a mission to conquer Earth. “Disguised in human form as an armed and dangerous 1950’s leather-clad biker gang, they show no mercy… until they catch the most toxic, contagious human disease of all: emotion,” reads the synopsis.
Blanchett, apparently, will be playing the leader of said gang. So yes: leather-clad, armed and dangerous Cate Blanchett should be coming to a screen near you.
It's a fun turn for the former Queen Elizabeth, no? And her outfits for this might be almost as good as everything she got to wear in Ocean's 8. Blanchett has, of course, been nominated for a whole pile of Oscars, and won two: Best Supporting Actress for The Aviator, and Best Actress for Blue Jasmine. She has played too many excellent roles to list here, but it would be silly not to mention her turns as Hela (Thor: Ragnarok, pictured above) and Galadriel (several Lord of the Rings movies, including, alas, those dreadfully long Hobbits).
Alpha Gang is expected to begin filming later this year. Further casting announcements will be watched with great curiosity.[end-mark]
It is almost time for the annual Cannes Film Festival, which means that a lot of uncertain movie news is in the air: Movies that may or may not get picked up, after festival screenings, for distribution; movies that may or may not be coming together for future productions. A lot of possibility is floating about, some of it more enticing than other bits. But this one is quite intriguing: Deadline reports that Greta Lee (Past Lives; Russian Doll, pictured above) and Kingsley Ben-Adir (Barbie; Secret Invasion) are in talks to star in 11817, a sci-fi horror film from director Louis Leterrier.
Leterrier is, depending on your personal predilections, either an interesting director of large-scale action films, or the guy who made the Ed Norton Hulk movie. His resume includes episodes of Lupin; the delightfully silly The Transporter; Fast X, which really ought to have been called Fast10 Your Seatbelts; and also the 2010 Clash of the Titans.
11817, which sounds more like a zip code than a film title, is written by Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters). According to Deadline, "The film watches as inexplicable forces trap a family of four inside their house indefinitely. As both modern luxuries and life or death essentials begin to run out, the family must learn how to be resourceful to survive and outsmart who — or what — is keeping them trapped…"
Actor Omar Sy (Lupin) is among the film's producers, along with Leterrier and Thomas Benski (a producer on The Northman, Pig, and Midsommar, among others); the three have a production company called Carousel Studios, and this film looks to be their first project.
No production timeline has been announced.[end-mark]
Welcome to Close Reads! Leah Schnelbach and guest authors will dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, Leah Blaine pulls her well-worn Sunfire Romances down from the shelf to look at the importance of an innocuous book cover.
As a young reader, I had the typical rotation of books befitting a young girl from the suburbs: Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley High, and various romance books. These books reaffirmed my own life and looked like mine did: girls in school grappling with friendships and crushes, parents and homework, expectations to work for good grades, to be well-mannered, and to someday grow up to be a mother and perhaps a teacher/nurse/secretary. One series, however, blew my world wide open and the books looked even more innocuous than those prototypical books churned out for voracious 1980s book girls.
Covers as cover, indeed.
Sunfire Romance books were written by a collection of writers under pen names that all followed the exact same formula: a teen girl from a specific historical era with dreams of her own must choose from two very different suitors. There are glaring offenses in the book that cannot be ignored (unsurprisingly, a la American Dolls, Corey, the black heroine of her book, has escaped from slavery). And yet, in a time and place where racial, social, and economic boundaries were strictly drawn, as they were in my time and place under the Cold War and Reagan, the fact that historical characters ventured to friendships and even romances with people different than them was revolutionary to a girl in a safe box made of ticky tacky.
From the covers alone, these are books that should have merely fanned the romantic passions of teen girls. A young woman stood at the center with her name, always the title, emblazoned above her while a male suitor stood at each shoulder (there would be a third suitor in the foreground for some lucky heroines). They would be dressed in easily identifiable historical clothing with a scene from the book depicted, like a kiss in front of a stagecoach or forlornly leaning on the rail of the Mayflower. There is nothing from the covers that hinted at the absolute agents of chaos living in the pages.
Because this is where the formula ends. Each heroine had her own dreams and desires. Some wanted to enter the accepted vocations of women of their era; plenty wanted to be teachers and nurses and many wanted to marry and have children. Others, however, wanted to work in the circus, be a war spy, or become a journalist. One young woman, Caroline, cut her hair, dressed as a man, and went by Caro (a family name, she said) in order to make her way to California for the Gold Rush like her brothers. Another, Renee, wanted to be a reporter in New York so badly she braved the Great Blizzard of 1888 to earn her first byline.
Their choices for romantic partners were typically confined to a hometown boy and one new to town–and, again, this is where the formula ended. The hometown boy didn’t always expect her to settle down and raise a family; sometimes they wanted to travel, leave the dust of their town behind them. The mysterious (because of course he was) stranger wasn’t always interested in blowing in and out with the wind, taking her along with him to exciting and different locales; sometimes he wanted to settle and confine her to where he thought she belonged.
The dreams of the heroines and their romantic partners’ ideals would also collide just as much as they would match. There was no formula for their alchemy and each heroine had to grapple with how to have her romance (the point of the books after all), but also stay true to who she wanted to be beyond the romance. Renee found fulfillment and success with her new career only to have her boyfriend expect her to leave it all behind to marry him and start a family. Caro, at least, got to keep her hair short and wear pants when her love proposed a life together; he loved her as she wanted to be, not his version of her.
Credit: Leah Blaine
And this is why books are banned. Not because they teach children how to rebel, teenagers know full well how to rebel, but because they show that the choices laid out by their family and community aren’t choices at all, but rather acceptable options already chosen for them. The idea that children would dare to choose something not offered to them is downright offensive to many parents and must be avoided at all costs hence micromanaging even the fiction they may come across.
This is what makes the Sunfire Romances so revolutionary for their time. Because if parents knew what these romance books were doing to their girls, the girls they wanted to grow up to organize bake sales and preside over the PTA (because obviously they would only be wives and mothers) then these books would be at the top of the banned list. They were an instruction manual on how to choose your own path. Taken alone, they were harmless stories of finding a husband. Taken together, they’re a road map to finding a life free of restrictive expectations. Rife with feminism under the corsets and petticoats, each girl was able to choose the elements to keep and the ones to leave behind. Some chose traditional paths and some did not, but every time, the thought and care that went into choosing for herself was evident. They weren’t merely rebelling against expectations for rebellion’s sake, not that there’s anything wrong with that if you ask me, but considering how the expectations of others and their own desires shaped their choices so as to be true to themselves.
Never was this more evident than in how we talked about these books that we devoured so quickly. For romance books, we spent very little time talking about the romance. No, we talked about how we looked up the Johnston flood after reading about Jennie (who knew Morse code and we needed to learn that, too; I can still tap out “hi” because of her) or about women's suffrage thanks to Laura (whose mother told her to stop worrying about her rights because she needed to marry and marry fast). It’s unsurprising how many of those friends went on to be excellent researchers as this was pre-whole world in our palm days; we could use a card catalog and navigate a library with our eyes closed by the time we left high school because looking up “how many women spies were there during the American Revolution?” (thanks for your service, Sabrina) or “what were conditions like in textile mills?” (good job joining the strike, Joanna) took up most afternoons and were never evident from the covers. We talked about not only the historical events, but how young the heroines were–that was something slightly mind-blowing to girls who had to be home when the street lights flickered. Margaret left Chicago for Nebraska by herself at 15 to teach in a one room schoolhouse while Merrie stowed away on the Mayflower. Again, line the books up together and it makes for a pretty impressive list of rabble-rousing young women who also liked to be twirled about and kissed and given flowers.
There is a direct line, then, from these covers to the Bridgerton screen adaptations and what romance readers have known for years: a cover that extols the virtues of a hetero romance may just be the undoing of women's roles and expectations.
We're thrilled to share an excerpt from The Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love, a historical fantasy rom-com by India Holton, out from Berkley on July 23rd.
Beth Pickering is on the verge of finally capturing the rare deathwhistler bird when Professor Devon Lockley swoops in, capturing both her bird and her imagination like a villain. Albeit a handsome and charming villain, but that’s beside the point. As someone highly educated in the ruthless discipline of ornithology, Beth knows trouble when she sees it, and she is determined to keep her distance from Devon.
For his part, Devon has never been more smitten than when he first set eyes on Professor Beth Pickering. She’s so pretty, so polite, so capable of bringing down a fiery, deadly bird using only her wits. In other words, an angel. Devon understands he must not get close to her, however, since they’re professional rivals.
When a competition to become Birder of the Year by capturing an endangered caladrius bird is announced, Beth and Devon are forced to team up to have any chance of winning. Now keeping their distance becomes a question of one bed or two. But they must take the risk, because fowl play is afoot, and they can’t trust anyone else—for all may be fair in love and war, but this is ornithology.
An ornithologist must be proficient in the three fundamentals of fieldwork: finding a bird, identifying a bird, and getting the hell away from that bird before it eats you.
Birds Through a Sherry Glass, H.A. Quirm
All along the streets to the museum, Beth met no trouble. Her plain brown coat, accompanied by a small hat, gloves, and air of cultivated intelligence, triggered fear in any man who glanced her way: one catcall, and she might educate them.
Slipping past museum staff to enter the archives with the speed and stealthiness of a well-trained ornithologist, she also met no trouble.
Wending a narrow path through shelves and cabinets to the back of the chamber, she met no—
“Hello.”
Beth stopped so abruptly her hat shuddered, and only because of her stiffened posture did it retain its place upon her head. “You!”
Devon Lockley gave her a lithe smile. “You,” he replied, his tone more friendly and thus far more dangerous than hers. Worse, he’d removed his dinner jacket and unknotted his tie. The bare, olive-toned skin visible where he’d unfastened his shirt collar took “trouble” and dunked it in a glass of hot, rum-infused devilry. Light from the small, dusty windows slid across his mouth languorously, stroking the smile.
Beth looked away, clearing her throat.
Shelves of boxes stood to the right of them, and to the left a row of specimen cabinets. A wide, shallow drawer lay open in the cabinet directly beside Devon, revealing assorted birdcalls, bird lures, and bird thingamajigs whose purpose had long since been forgotten.
His expression tilted with sardonic humor. “I suspect you’re not in the basement of the Museum of Magical Birds for the purpose of an afternoon stroll, Miss Pickering. You’ve come for the caladrius call.”
Beth applied to her sense of decorum for a suitable response, but it took one look at the man and turned away, busying itself with dusting its precious antique collection of curtsies. Left to her own devices, she gave him a second, considering look.
He was implausibly handsome for a university professor, who in Beth’s experience were a pallid lot, rather musty, with a constant yearning in their eyes for dinner, wine, and their latest lecture to magically write itself. But if there was any yearning done in regard to Devon Lockley, it was almost certainly not by him but toward him. Not that Beth felt any such yearning. Heavens no! She was far too sensible for that. The riotous sensations in her stomach were merely due to French tea. She also suspected him of possessing masculine wiles. He probably kept them up his sleeve or in a trouser pocket—upon which thought, Beth glanced at said pocket, and managed to prevent herself from blushing only by dint of general aggravation. She hauled her vision up by the scruff of its neck and discovered Devon watching her smugly, as if he could guess her thoughts and was considering whether to reach his naked hand into that pocket and bring out something truly scandalous indeed. Her aggravation increased by several notches.
“I am here to do some research,” she said, silently reassuring herself that it was the whitest of lies; beige at most. “However, this seems a convenient opportunity to apologize to you for our fracas in Spain.”
“No need,” Devon answered easily. In response, Beth’s aggravation forgot about climbing notches and took flight instead.
“Absolutely there is a need! I was an ill-mannered scoundrel of the worst kind to assault you with a parasol!”
“You ought to be stern and judgmental.” She thrust out a gloved hand. “I insist upon apologizing. Kindly frown at me and then shake hands, so we may reestablish a civil rivalry between us.”
“All right,” he agreed—then ruined it by adding, “My pleasure.” He gave her a frown that was clearly wearing nothing more than a wicked grin beneath its coat. But before Beth could summon offense, he took her hand.
Immediately, she knew she’d made a tactical error. His bare fingers were warm even through the kid leather of her glove. His grip was firm in a way that made the description “firm” seem altogether salacious. An electric sensation rushed through her body, setting off alarms hither and yon. All that saved her was remembering the job she’d come to do.
“How do you know about the caladrius call?” she asked. Devon shrugged. “You told me.” “I beg your pardon—?—!”
“Well, to be precise, you told my spy, Lady Trimble, who then told me.”
“Egad!” Beth gasped. “That’s cheating!”
“Come now, Miss Pickering,” he said, laughing. “All may be fair in love and war, but this is ornithology. Cheating is practically one of our scientific principles. Or did they not teach you that at—let me guess, Liverpool University?”
He wanted to aggravate her. “Oxford,” she answered in her politest tone. After all, she could climb trees without showing her petticoats and wrangle birds into cages without swearing. No man was going to disturb her equanimity.
He smiled.
“Villain!” she remonstrated at once, before she even knew what she was doing. And once she’d got going, alas, there seemed no stopping her. “Don’t try that charm on me, if you please. I will not succumb like some—some—liberal arts undergraduate.”
“If you say so, Miss Pickering,” he answered, still smiling. “I do beg your pardon. And while I can’t apologize for using Lady Trimble to spy on you, I will point out that at least I chose to run here and find the call before you might, rather than steal it from you outright. Not that such virtue did me any good.” He frowned askance at the open drawer. “This collection looks like a pack of first-year students have held a keg party among it.”
The apology, such as it was, mollified her. “Perhaps we aren’t the first to come searching,” she suggested in a calmer tone. “Hippolyta cannot be the only one to know about the call.”
“Which also means others might appear at any moment.” Devon glanced over her shoulder as if expecting a sudden influx of ornithologists bearing lockpicks, pistols, and emergency marriage certificates for use upon discovering a bachelor and spinster alone together. Beth’s nerves ruffled all over again. Really, this encounter was going to drive her to drink, and she did not think there was enough tea in all of Paris for the purpose.
“I suggest a compromise,” she said. “I will search for the call, and you will stand guard, and once I’ve found it we will leave quietly so as to not draw attention to ourselves. What say you?”
“I say you need a better dictionary,” Devon replied, grinning. He looked over her shoulder again; glancing back, Beth thought she saw a darkness move between shelves, but she blinked and it was gone.
“I’m being paranoid,” Devon murmured, shaking his head. “How about I look for the call, you do the same, and may the best birder win?” “And when I win?” she asked cautiously.
“When I win, we’ll agree to disagree, and depart without further argument.”
“Very well.” She turned toward the cabinet—only to discover she and Devon were still holding hands. He realized at the same moment and released her just as she was pulling away. She rubbed her hand against her waist. Devon shoved his through his hair. Stepping apart, they set to opening cabinet drawers.
“I admit I’m a little daunted, competing with Britain’s youngest-ever professor,” Devon said as they worked.
Beth glanced at him sidelong. Was he mocking her? Or had that been a note of sincerity in his voice? If he’d whistled a birdsong, she’d have been able to interpret it at once, but her ability with human conversation was mediocre at best, and this one certainly had her floundering. She decided to retreat, as usual, behind niceness.
“I’m daunted myself,” she said, “competing with an academic wunderkind.”
“That’s merely a rumor started by my thesis examination panel because they wanted to get away early for a fishing trip.”
Beth stared at him with astonishment. “Really?”
He just grinned in reply, his dark eyes glimmering. Instantly, Beth’s aggravation discarded niceness and leaped once more into the breach, swinging its fists wildly and suggesting she close the wall up with a dead professor. Turning away, she rummaged through the birdcalls, not even seeing them.
For a while, Devon searched quietly alongside. But all too soon they were elbowing each other… leaning past each other to grab at something that looked like a possibility… humphing and tsking and smacking at hands… completely missing the caladrius call lying among several other antique whistles… then seeing it finally and both snatching at it with such urgency they knocked it clear off the tray. It flew past them, fell to the floor, and rolled through a gap between two shelving units.
“Now look what you’ve done!” they said simultaneously. “It wasn’t my fault!” they replied in chorus.
And shoving at each other, they squeezed their way through the gap to crouch in the dark narrow space behind, groping around the floor for the little wooden call. Thighs pressed against each other; shoulders rubbed; etiquette rules exploded left, right, and center. Finally, Beth’s fingers stumbled upon the call, and she clutched it in triumph.
Unfortunately, Devon did the same. “Let go!” she hissed at him.
“You first!” he hissed back. “How dare—”
“Shut up.”
Beth gasped in genuine shock. “I beg your pardon!”
He relinquished the call, but only so as to slap his hand over her mouth. Beth’s heart leaped with what was almost certainly alarm and not delighted excitement.
“Shh!” he whispered. “I heard something.”
Beth nodded. Devon moved his hand away, and together they shifted apart two boxes on the shelf at eye level so they could peer through to the passageway beyond.
Tap-tap.
Beth slapped her own hand over her mouth. A bird was tiptoeing delicately over the dusty floor—a dull brown bird, not much bigger than a magpie, with dainty legs and a small black beak. Vanellus carnivorus, her brain automatically recited.
Rabid flesh-eating lapwing.
It was the most vicious, deadly little bird this side of the Mediterranean. With scant effort it could bring down a grown man and the horse beneath him, and the servants attending him, and their horses too. Almost its entire population had been exterminated, leaving only two specimens in the highest-security aviaries.
And one in this basement.
Suddenly, Beth could not breathe. This was not due to her hand over her mouth; rather, she simply could not remember the process of inhaling air. The lapwing’s claws tapped gently against the floorboards, providing an eerily calm counterpoint to her crashing heartbeat. She and Devon were sitting ducks, with no easy way of escape. As it passed where they crouched behind the shelf, there came a tiny click of fang against beak, and the warm vanilla scent the bird used to attract prey. Instinct urged Beth to follow that scent, to tuck herself into coziness beneath the lapwing’s soft wing. Intelligence managed to restrain her, however, and the lapwing continued farther down the passageway, its lure diminishing as it went. Beth and Devon glanced at each other, exhaling with relief—
The lapwing froze. It cocked its head.
“Damn!” Devon swore. Grabbing Beth’s arm, he hauled her up with him and pushed her toward the gap in the shelving. “Run!”
April was a very busy month, I was in Chicago the whole time helping Ada Palmer run the Papal Election of 1492. We elected a terrible pope, had a terrible war, imposed another terrible pope, and generally had a great time. However, I had barely any time to read anything except papal election letters; I also wrote a lot of papal election letters (and, as patrons of my Patreon already know, papal election poetry) and read only four books—this is normal when the only time I read is when I read myself to sleep.
Escape to Florence — Kat Devereaux (2023) Romance novel set in Italy, with a contemporary romance and another story set during the Italian period of resistance to fascism at the end of WWII. It's hard to keep these things in balance and make the pacing work right, and the book doesn't, really: the WWII material is so much darker that none of the modern-day problems seem like problems—and indeed they dissolve very easily. Having said that, the historical story might have been too dark to take without the modern story buoying it up. The details of Florence and of Italian bureaucracy were very well done. I enjoyed this and thought about it and the balance and connection of the two stories more than I usually would with a book like this. It's a first novel, and I'll keep an eye on the author.
The Land Where Lemons Grow — Helena Attlee (2014) A non-fiction book about citrus in Italy, looking at the historical and present-day cultivation of lemons, oranges, bergamot, and citrons in different parts of Italy. This was weirdly interesting and full of information and anecdotes. It's a combination history and food and travel memoir, and there are occasional recipes. It's well written and surprisingly varied. I had no idea bergamot was cultivated for anything but Earl Grey tea, but it turns out to be a major constituent of a lot of perfumes. I also knew nothing about the fussy requirements of cultivation of citrons for Sukkot. If you're interested in citrus fruit you probably know all this already, but if you're wanting to learn about a new thing that's kind of cool and intersects with a lot of other things, this is an engaging read.
Family Gathering — Elizabeth Cadell (1979) Cadell wrote light fiction, some of it genre romance and some of it not, and she was very good at atmosphere and characters (especially children) and very bad at romance. (Indeed, I had to make up a race of aliens to fix Bridal Array because humans just don't work in that plot.) Family Gathering is set immediately after WWII, in 1948 or 1949, and it's about a kind of character you almost never see in fiction, and when you do you absolutely never see them treated sympathetically. Natalie Rome is a weak, spineless woman who finds it hard to make up her mind and impossible to argue with stronger-willed people, so she is pushed around. Her stepdaughter Lucille is the same way. Her daughter Helen has become a bully from the need to parent her mother since her father died. The universe of this novel requires that Helen learn to submit and not dominate, which is decidedly uncomfortable to read. However, it's fascinating reading Natalie being treated as sympathetic and central. The book is very funny in some parts, and although some of the characters are caricatures, and although it is a series of set pieces rather than a real plot, it overall works better than it deserves. I would not call this a good book, and I would not exactly recommend it, but I'm not at all sorry I read it.
Ash — Malinda Lo (2009) Dark YA lesbian retelling of Cinderella that is precisely written and observed. This is a weird book, actually. It has great worldbuilding that feels really solid, and then it does very little with the greenwitches and philosophers that it has established so well. The faery elements are terrific, the whole way the wood and the magic and the faeries are done is solid and excellent, but in the way it’s used it leans into the angsty dark boyfriend a little too much. Similarly, the threat and power of the stepmother is conveniently present or absent for plot reasons. And we just won't think about the economics of the world. It's very atmospheric, but after the other, better, later written, Lo I have read, this was a little disappointing. She was already a really good writer when she wrote this, and I'm glad she went with her strengths of writing family and character in real researchable worlds where the solid background details that real history provides can give support to the things she does so well.
