A forlorn teenager’s monotonous life is interrupted when a stranger draws him into the hunt for a vampiric serial killer. He will learn that while monsters are much more real than he thought, there is no such thing as heroes.
Baby Teeth
The Low Standards of the Legal Profession: John Connolly’s “The Fractured Atlas,” Part 6
Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we finish up John Connolly’s The Fractured Atlas, first published in 2015 as part of Night Music: Nocturnes Volume II, with Part V: “And in Darkness Shall We Dwell.” Spoilers ahead.
[“Lionel Maulding never stopped screaming, but he made no noise in that place.”]
Series: Reading the Weird
A Wonderful Use of YA Tropes: Beasts of Prey by Ayana Gray
In the Pan-African inspired fantasy land of Eshōza, a monster known as the Shetani hunts and kills anyone who strays into its jungle. For nearly a century, the citizens of the city of Lkossa have feared the beast, but now two teens from opposite ends of the social hierarchy are teaming up to take it down.
As an indentured servant to the Night Zoo, Koffi tends to and trains strange and dangerous creatures with her mother. The end of their contract is close enough to taste, but a tragic event pushes that deadline far into the future. Staring down a lifetime of being chained to the zoo, Koffi strikes a deal to pay off her and her loved ones’ debts in exchange for capturing the dreaded Shetani. Ekon, the son of one of the most powerful families in Lkossa, is on the verge of becoming a Son of the Six, elite warriors who protect the city and brutally enforce its rules. When his chance at a promotion is stripped away, he decides his best chance at gaining his position back is to do something spectacular: kill the Shetani.
Step Right Up! Five Recent Fantasy Stories Set at a Circus
Photo: Stephen Noble [via Unsplash]
Circuses! They seem like such a safe, wholesome source of communal entertainment. Yet, many who’ve ventured under a circus big top have faced unexpected consequences—some quite dangerous for performers in real life. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that the circus provides such a lively—and occasionally treacherous—setting for these five recent fantasies.
Amazon’s New Wheel of Time Trailer Sets the Show’s Epic Stakes
Last month, we got our first real look at Amazon’s adaptation of The Wheel of Time—but that was only a teaser. The real trailer is here, and it’s so much more. The full trailer introduces the Aes Sedai, Moiraine’s quest, the importance of the people she finds in Two Rivers—and the evil they’re all facing.
Beyond Dark Academia: The Real Horror in Magic School Is Systemic Inequality
Screenshot: SyFy
Science Fiction and Fantasy are full of magic school stories, from contemporary and urban fantasy colleges to second world universities, private schools, academies, and boarding schools. Many of these tales contain horror elements, even if they aren’t monsters and mayhem through and through. Increasingly, these sorts of stories—especially ones set in some version of higher education—are getting branded as “dark academia,” an aesthetic that uncritically privileges a certain, exclusive sort of scholarly “life of the mind” and mixes that ideal with elements of mystery, crime, danger, and, well, general darkness. And that’s a problem.
There are compelling reasons for “dark” or “gritty” representations of college and grad school, even and especially in a fantasy setting. But as a subgenre, magic school stories tend to skip over those compelling reasons in favor of external monsters and villains. In the process, they miss the fact that the murderer isn’t just calling from inside the house—it is the house. Or, rather, it’s the ivory tower (and its self-appointed gatekeepers).
A Murder Mystery in Space: Far From the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson
There’s nothing I love more than a good locked-room murder mystery, an eternally beloved subgenre of crime writing that embodies humanity’s dogged need to know. But these can also be, more often than not, one-dimensional narrative dioramas that stick to the basic formula without distinction. This is, unsurprisingly, not the case with Far From the Light of Heaven, Tade Thompson’s newest novel which marries shades of gothic horror with a sleuthing mystery and hard sci-fi rooted in real astronauts’ accounts of living in space.
Pixar’s Lightyear Achieves First Teaser Liftoff
In case you forgot that Disney is making a Buzz Lightyear movie… well, Disney is making a Buzz Lightyear movie. Lightyear isn’t about the toy we know from all the Toy Story movies; it’s about the human test pilot who inspired the toy, and who is now voiced by Chris Evans. Not that Evans says much in this first teaser, which makes unforgivable use of David Bowie’s “Starman” and continues the Toy Story trend of referencing Star Wars … maybe a bit too much.
Pesky Pirates and Purple Prose: Brigands of the Moon by Ray Cummings
In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
Today we’re going to look at a book by Ray Cummings, an author who was ubiquitous in the pulps during the period between the World Wars of the 20th century, but who is not well remembered today. It’s a story of action and adventure, set on a space passenger liner caught up in a titanic struggle between worlds—a story where our heroes must contend with the titular Brigands of the Moon!
Telling Our Stories: When Mexican Folklore and Oral Tradition Meet Sci-Fi
Calavera de la Catrina (Skull of the Female Dandy) by José Guadalupe Posada, c. 1910
When I tell people about my latest book, The Last Cuentista, the first thing they ask is how a story like this even happened. I can see where a merging of Mexican folklore and sci-fi might seem incongruous to most. But to me they’ve always been interlaced.
My love of sci-fi began in black and white. Family holidays were spent with heaping plates of food, and Rod Serling ushering in a Twilight Zone marathon. We’d seen every episode so many times, we all raced to be the first to blurt out,“That’s not fair. That’s not fair at all. There was time now. There was, was all the time I needed…” or… “It’s a cookbook!”
So yeah, science fiction felt like home.
Netflix’s Live-Action Cowboy Bebop Gets a Snappy, Stellar Trailer
Sure, it’s only a trailer, it’s not the show, but this is great. Netflix has been teasing us with little Cowboy Bebop bits for weeks—the opening credits, the “Lost Session“—but they finally served up an official trailer for the live-action Cowboy Bebop, and it’s stylish, snappy, and sometimes downright gorgeous.
Baby Teeth
A forlorn teenager’s monotonous life is interrupted when a stranger draws him into the hunt for a vampiric serial killer. He will learn that while monsters are much more real than he thought, there is no such thing as heroes.
Read a Selection From Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
The strange is made familiar and the familiar strange…
We’re thrilled to share a selection from Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the debut story collection from author Kim Fu—publishing February 1, 2022 with Tin House Books.
Why Fantasy Should Seem Real
As a young child devouring every fantasy book I could get my hands on, I was incredibly lucky to have not only a mentor in my school librarian but also an unlimited transatlantic supply of books from my grandmother’s bookshop back home in the UK. One of the books Grandma sent me was Robin McKinley’s Outlaws of Sherwood; that and the duology of The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown cemented my profound love of McKinley’s characterization and accessibility.
I’d read lots of high fantasy before encountering McKinley, and the enormous difference between her heroes and, say, Tolkien’s struck me as both new and welcoming. McKinley’s protagonists are people, not archetypes—fallible, unsure of themselves, practical, vulnerable. As a young reader I could fit myself into Aerin or Harry or Robin or Marian (or Cecily) in a way I’d never been able to fit into Tolkien’s people.
Unwelcome Is a Reminder to Always Look a Gift House in the Mouth
In the Before Times, I might have felt a little judgey toward poor Hannah John-Kamen in the trailer for Unwelcome. You had one task! Remember to leave the blood out for the redcaps! But these days I can barely remember to brush my teeth—and my living conditions don’t involve murderous tiny neighbors and a whole town full of people who hate me for moving in. So maybe I should cut her some slack.
Unwelcome, the new film from Grabbers director Jon Wright, stars John-Kamen (Killjoys) and Douglas Booth (Jupiter Ascending) as “a couple who escape their urban nightmare to the tranquility of rural Ireland only to discover malevolent, murderous goblins lurking in the gnarled, ancient wood at the foot of their new garden.”
Horror as Strength: Queer Armor in Stephen King’s IT
I grew up terrified.
When I was 12, I wasn’t particularly afraid of clowns or monsters or troubled ghosts, but as puberty hit at the start of middle school, I was terrified of myself.
I was a gay boy in the early 90s and though I didn’t quite have the vocabulary for it, I knew that I wasn’t like any of the other kids at my all-boys prep school, where masculinity was modeled, crafted, and policed in very specific ways; ways I feared I did not—and could not—match. I knew the game “smear the queer,” and played it as the smearer and the smeared with a knot in my stomach, because it taught me the inevitable violence attached to being different in that way. Smearer or smeared, those were the only options. Though no one ever said so explicitly, every message I received told me that if I was gay, I was doomed.
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