Haunted by stories he hears while on jury duty, a documentary filmmaker finds himself in an abandoned mall at the dead of night.
Black Leg
Murder Books 101: Serial Killer POVs From Poe to Big Gurl
Illustration to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" (Arthur Rackham, 1935)
Serial killer narration is the hot sauce on the tuna casserole of a murder book. What would Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon (1981) be without the talking William Blake painting that keeps yelling at poor Francis Dolarhyde to pump iron and get jacked so women can’t threaten to snip off his penis with scissors anymore? Psycho (1959) stays firmly in third person limited point-of-view but its twist wouldn’t work if chapters didn’t keep dumping us into Norman Bates’ head while he has perfectly reasonable conversations with “Mother.” By the final chapter her voice has eaten his away like acid, a genuinely chilling end that works far better than Hitchcock’s closing square-up.
It’s almost impossible to read a murder book anymore that doesn’t include cuckoo chapters from the psychopath’s POV because they’re just so much fun to write. “Watch this!” writers say as they go full Method. “I’m going to totally channel the voice of a man who pretends to use a wheelchair but is really murdering children while dressed as a nurse in order to transcend gender and become immortal. I’m an artist! I can do anything!” But to do anything, there needed to be decades of work by writers as varied as Shirley Jackson and Richard Wright before someone could give us a serial killer book with Elvis wearing a chihuahua inside his pants.
Rhythm of War Reread: Interlude Five
Cosmere Chickens ahoy—in more ways than one! This week’s reread involves two actual Cosmere Chickens, along with all the rest of us peeps. Join us in the reread for Lift’s interlude, with Wyndle being his adorable self, interrupted by yet another of those characters most of us love to hate. Also, That Everstorm, with all it brings… And chickens. Did I say chickens?
Series: Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson
Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem Is Now a Podcast
Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem has been a massive hit for over a decade now, garnering praise from the likes of President Barack Obama and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Netflix is set to adapt the trilogy as a live-action series (from the creators of HBO’s Game of Thrones), but if you haven’t picked it up yet, there’s a new medium to consider: Tor Books and Macmillan Audio is releasing the audiobook as a podcast, and you can start listening to it now.
One Person’s Hell Dimension: T. Kingfisher’s The Hollow Places, Part 10
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 cover Chapters 19-20 of T. Kingfisher’s The Hollow Places, first published in 2020. Spoilers ahead!
Series: Reading the Weird
Architecture and Melodrama: Celebrating Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris
Woodcut of Notre-Dame (Artist unknown, 1857)
…seeing that I was good for nothing, of my own free will I became a poet and a rhymester. That is a trade which one can always adopt when one is a vagabond.
–Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was born in turbulent times. His father, a not always successful officer with Napoleon’s army, also fought frequently with his wife. The combined marital and martial strife meant that Hugo spent his early years almost constantly on the move, with little stability until 1815, when Napoleon fell from power. Hugo converted to his mother’s royalist views—his political opinions would later greatly change on this point—and agreed to study law. His real love, however, was always for poetry. He had a talent: on the strength of his first book of poems alone, Odes et poesies diverses (1822), the restored Bourbon king granted him a pension.
Loki Finds the Man Behind the Curtain in “For All Time. Always.”
Screenshot: Marvel Studios
We’ve reached the end (of all things?) and the word of the day is two words: Free will.
WandaVision Director Matt Shakman Will Helm the Next Star Trek Film
Screenshot: Paramount
Paramount has lined up a director for its next Star Trek film: Matt Shakman, who recently helmed the entirety of Marvel’s WandaVision, according to Deadline. According to the publication, the project has been written by Lindsey Beer and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, and it’s set to begin production at some point in the spring of 2022.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence Wanted Us to Cherish Our Humanity Before It Becomes Too Late
Screenshot: Warner Bros. Pictures
I have a fantasy about June 26, 2001. I have a fantasy about a certain person, a die-hard, unapologetic Kubrick acolyte, who has come to witness the debut of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. There she/he sits, in the very first row of the very first screening…but not to watch Spielberg pay homage to friend and mentor Stanley Kubrick, who developed and largely fleshed out the original idea for A.I. (with a significant contribution from Ian Watson) before passing it on to Spielberg in the belief that the director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial could better navigate the film’s emotional beats. No, this person has come with an expectation, born of a certain over-simplified preconception of Kubrick, of Spielberg.
This person has come to witness his/her worst nightmare come true. [Does the student betray the master? Read on!]
Choosing Hell: C.S. Lewis, the Great Divorce, and Human Freedom
When Lewis finds the queue for the bus he has been walking in endless rain in a twilight town that is ever expanding but mostly empty. The line for the bus is something different than the monotonous city blocks, and he joins it as two others—a couple, apparently—end a disagreement by leaving the line. Others are fighting, jostling for position. Still others are disgusted by the class (or lack thereof) of the people in line. There’s a moment where someone cheats their way to a place further up in line. There’s a fistfight. Through it all there’s a sort of certainty that there won’t be room for everyone on the bus. And yet, when Lewis finally boards there’s plenty of room…indeed, it could have held every poor soul who had initially been in the line.
Lewis has made his choice and joined the tour, and others have made their choice and stayed in the grey city. The story of The Great Divorce hinges on this precisely: the choices that human beings make, and how those choices may or may not influence their place in eternity.
Series: The Great C.S. Lewis Reread
Five Speculative Visions of a Future America
Map of the U.S. by Samuel Augustus Mitchell, 1867
Human polities cohere into empires (often thanks to conquest) and then break apart (Rome, for example)… then perhaps re-form in some fashion (China, Germany). Such processes can be devastating to those forced to live through them. But they also provide rich plot fodder for authors, SFF authors included. Today I’m going to tackle a small subset of political-breakup SFF novels: those that treat of the decline and fall of the US and the rise of its successor states. Here are five vintage examples.
Marvel’s Loki Is Coming Back for Season 2
Screenshot: Marvel Studios
Loki wraps up its short, six-episode run on Disney+ today, and fans who sat through the final credits got confirmation that it wasn’t the last we’ll see of the character: Marvel has officially renewed the series for a second season.
Read an Excerpt From The Last House on Needless Street
In a boarded-up house on a dead-end street at the edge of the wild Washington woods lives a family of three…
From Catriona Ward, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award and the August Derleth Award, comes The Last House on Needless Street, a book Stephen King calls “a true nerve-shredder that keeps its mind-blowing secrets to the very end.” The novel hits shelves on September 28th from Nightfire.
We’re thrilled to be sharing the first three excerpts today—read the first part, from Ted’s point of view, below, then read part two, from Olivia the cat’s point of view, over at the Nightfire site, and then head over to the Tor Forge Blog to read part three, from Lauren’s point of view.
Black Leg
Haunted by stories he hears while on jury duty, a documentary filmmaker finds himself in an abandoned mall at the dead of night.
Sleeps With Monsters: Making Good Choices
Last time out, I believe I mentioned Jo Spurrier’s Winter Be My Shield, and mentioned that I’d be reading the next two books in the “Children of the Black Sun” trilogy as soon as I could get my hands on them. Those books are Black Sun Light My Way and North Star Guide Me Home, and they are just as good, if not better, than their predecessor.
Series: Sleeps With Monsters
Fauns, Fate, and the Future: Matt Bell’s Appleseed
Have you ever dug your hands down into real, rich dirt? Like say you’re gardening or planting a tree, and you push your hands down into layers of loam and crumbly black dirt, and you found roots, and bits of stone, and maybe some confused worms? And if you’re not wearing gloves—maybe you like the feeling of dirt on your hands—you can feel the strata of warm and cool earth as you push your fingers down and down and down? You can feel how far the sunlight reached? And then you have dirt in your cuticles and under your fingernails for hours no matter how much your scrub at them?
Reading Matt Bell’s Appleseed is like that.
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