An artist’s work attracts the eye of Andrey Porgee, a notorious gangster, who becomes her best customer.
But when he commissions a painting based on a childhood photograph, the artist fears his reaction to the final product.
Porgee’s Boar
It’s Time to Do a Die Hard in the Trailer for Rick and Morty’s Sixth Season
Mostly, this trailer is chaos. Rick and Morty returns in just a few weeks, and Adult Swim has just released a look at the sixth season—a look which includes explosions, lasers, human shields, and a specific instruction: “Do a Die Hard!”
Five Dark YA Fantasies About the Fae
"Fairies Looking Through A Gothic Arch" by John Anster Fitzgerald, c. 1864
The first house I lived in was a bi-level with a long, straight-shot hallway from the kitchen to the living room. Full length mirrors were set into the walls, in very 1980s fashion. My brother and I would turn off all the lights in the house and run up and down that hallway, catching ghostly glimpses of ourselves in the mirrors, playing “Night Faeries.”
A foreboding kind of rush would prickle through me as I held my arms out wide, making them wings, and swooping along in search of night flowers and glowing fruits (I think we were watching a lot of FernGully at the time). There was something illicit to the whole thing—being in the dark, transforming ourselves into something human but not quite. I couldn’t have recognized it at six years old, but there was a whiff of the uncanny to our game, and it was laced with “what if.” What if we were us, but we could fly? What if we were us, but magic?
That, I think, is one of the reasons fae stories are so enduring. They could be us. Fae are often portrayed as looking human, speaking like humans, interacting with humans, but they’re more. Immortal, bearers of powers that inspire both awe and fear. We want to get closer.
Series: Five Books About…
Stephen King’s The Regulators Is Headed to the Screen
You can never have too many Stephen King adaptations. According to Deadline, the next work from the prolific author on the adaptation docket is The Regulators, the 1996 novel about… well, wow, this one’s about a lot. Including transforming houses?
The book has been optioned by the Bohemia Group, which brought on George Cowan—who seems to be new to screenwriting, at least per his stark IMDb page—to write the screenplay.
Sometimes, Only the Most Heart-Crushing Book Will Do
"Young Woman Reading" by Alexandre-Louis-Marie Charpentier, 1896
The first time I read a book that made me sob—great choking sobs that I desperately did not want anyone to hear me making—I was on a Greyhound bus, reading Where the Red Fern Grows. I was not yet old enough to have learned the painful lesson that, often, when there are loyal or exceptional or loving or generally wonderful animals in a book, bad things are likely to happen to them.
Sobbing on a Greyhound is a memorable experience. But then, so is the experience of reading any book that can reduce you to a puddle, no matter where you are. There is much to be said for books that do the opposite—the ones that light a fire, that lift you up and remind you what matters, that inspire and brighten and gleam. For triumph and the thrill of success, for the books full of excitement and drama, the ones that make you feel like you ought to lean forward in your seat while you read them, to get somehow closer to the action.
But let’s talk about the absolute heartbreakers for a minute.
Rhythm of War Reread: Chapter Eighty-Nine
Lyn: Good morning, cosmere chickens!
Paige: Happy Stormlight Thursday to you all. We’re rejoining Navani and Raboniel this week, our favorite frenemies who love to science.
L: Obligatory…
P: And love to do it together. We see some great conversation in this chapter between the Queen and the Lady of Wishes, but we’ll talk about that below.
L: Alice had to take a bit of a breather for a (joyous) family reason, so I’ll be joining Paige again this week.
[Science was all about lines, about imposing order on chaos.]
Series: Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson
A Town of Washed-Out Memories: Revealing Naomi Salman’s Nothing but the Rain
Photo courtesy of Naomi Salman
A sleepy little town discovers its memories have become part of the water cycle in Naomi Salman’s debut novella, Nothing but the Rain—available March 14, 2023 from Tordotcom Publishing.
Understatement of the Space-Time Continuum: N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (Part 5)
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 continue N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became with Chapter 6. The novel was first published in March 2020. Spoilers ahead! CW for depictions of racist and misogynist art including some that graphically portrays sexual assault.
[“What part of ‘we don’t do bigotry’ do you not understand?”]
Series: Reading the Weird
The Future Struggles to Grow in the Promising Trailer for Vesper
Vesper had me with its first teaser, which showed a dangerous, damaged future world full of strange plants and inequity. The full trailer, though, has even more to offer: This isn’t just a damaged world. It’s one run by cruel and selfish oligarchs who have their own precious safe Citadel locked up tight.
Read an Excerpt From Monsters Born and Made
She grew up battling the monsters that live in the black seas, but it couldn’t prepare her to face the cunning cruelty of the ruling elite.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from South Asian-inspired YA fantasy Monsters Born and Made by Tanvi Berwah, publishing with Sourcebooks Fire on September 6th.
All the New Young Adult SFF Books Arriving in August!
Head below for a list of the young adult SFF titles heading your way in August!
The Menu Puts the Pain in Ralph Fiennes’ Painstakingly Planned Meal
The Menu looks a bit like what might happen if Hannibal (Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, to be precise) had his own private island and a considerable staff. Though there’s not quite enough meat on the table… at least not just yet.
The Pursuit of Happyness — Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Screenshot: Marvel Studios
From August 2017 – January 2020, Keith R.A. DeCandido took a weekly look at every live-action movie based on a superhero comic that had been made to date in the weekly Superhero Movie Rewatch. In this latest revisit we’ve covered some older movies—It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman!, Mandrake, and the two Timecop movies—and two December 2021 releases—Spider-Man: No Way Home and The King’s Man—we finish off with the first three 2022 movies: The Batman, Morbius, and now the latest Doctor Strange flick.
The concept of the multiverse has been all over Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After Avengers: Endgame gave us the notion of alternate time tracks and Spider-Man: Far from Home had Mysterio using the concept as part of his long con to end Phase Three, we’ve gotten the multiverse spelled out in Loki, explored in more depth in What If…? season one, and serving as the plot catalyst in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, it is the plot…
[You break the rules and become a hero. I do it, and I become the enemy. That doesn’t seem fair.]
Series: 4-Color to 35-Millimeter: The Great Superhero Movie Rewatch
Five SFF Takes on Reality TV
Reality TV is a horror show. Except when it’s hilarious. Few genres can walk that fine line between sublimely terrifying and divinely ridiculous, which makes reality TV a particularly special kind of programming. It’s no surprise that Squid Game, last year’s must-watch series and this year’s Emmy Award darling, became such a big hit with the idea of a reality TV show aired to a tiny, elite audience that paired children’s games (and glorious sets that reminded us of the playground or nursery) with bloodshed. Now Netflix (which aired the series) is even creating an actual Squid Game: The Challenge reality competition series. No bloodshed, of course, but 456 contestants will be able to scramble for $4.56 million, the biggest cash prize a competition show has ever offered.
When reality TV goes to the movies, however, there tends to be approximately 90 percent less fun and games and 100 percent more totalitarianism. Here are five instances of reality TV reimagined for the big screen, and there’s a commonality to nearly all of these movies: The shows live in lurid colors (often crimson) and their ubiquity is trumpeted in exclamation points: They’re the Most Watched TV Shows Ever!!! in their dystopian near futures… a phrase that implicates all of us in the audience along with the warped minds who came up with the concepts in the first place.
How to Keep Fighting: Romance & Rebellion in Suleikha Snyder’s Third Shift Series
Here’s where I confess my most significant shortcoming as an SFF romance critic: The only paranormal romances I had read before this year were Meljean Brook’s Guardian series. They are classics for sure, but perceptive romance readers will correctly detect that this also means I have never read not even one single shifter romance. No, I had never read the Psy-Changeling series. No, the Immortals After Dark books either. No, obviously not the books by that one lady who tried to copyright the omegaverse. Luckily, the romance genre is a welcoming one, and I anticipate with pleasing expectation that my readers will drop their paranormal recs in the comments (especially paranormals by BIPOC and other marginalized authors).
For my first! ever! shifter! novel!, I doubled up and read the first two books in Suleikha Snyder’s Third Shift series (more, hopefully, to come in the future!).
Porgee’s Boar
An artist’s work attracts the eye of Andrey Porgee, a notorious gangster, who becomes her best customer.
But when he commissions a painting based on a childhood photograph, the artist fears his reaction to the final product.
New in Series
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