We found out in January that Sony Motion Pictures is working on a trio of films to take place in the zombie universe of the 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later films. The first new feature, 28 Years Later, will unsurprisingly be a sequel to the two previous movies, the first one starring Cillian Murphy (pictured above).
While we knew that Murphy was on board 28 Years Later as an executive producer, we didn’t have any confirmation that he would act in the movie. In an interview with Deadline, however, Sony Motion Pictures Group chairman Tom Rothman confirmed that Murphy would show up in the upcoming film directed by Danny Boyle. Rothman didn’t say exactly how Murphy would appear on screen, but teased that it would be “in a surprising way and in a way that grows.”
That statement is vague, but it suggests that maybe Murphy will show up in a cameo-type role that may or may not be a portrayal of his previous character. We do know that 28 Years Later will star other actors, with Jodie Comer (Killing Eve), Ralph Fiennes (The Menu), and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass) taking on lead roles.
And while we don’t know plot details, we know that Alex Garland (Annihilation) is penning all three scripts and that at least the first two will be filmed back-to-back, with Nia DaCosta taking the director’s chair for the second film.
No news yet on when 28 Years Later will premiere in theaters. [end-mark]
Tiffany and Letitia talk about how she can do magic and where it might come from in her family. They have to head back to her home because that’s where she left the spell she cast on Tiffany. On getting there, Tiffany finds that Letitia is absolutely a witch and helps all the ghosts at her estate. They head to the family library where Tiffany smells something awful and they find Letitia’s spell and the answer to why it worked: She cast it next to the book written by the Omnian priest who became the Cunning Man. That is the reason why all this has happened. Tiffany tells Letitia that she has to tell Roman what she did and clean up her own messes, like a witch should. Tiffany sleeps in the dungeon to find that Preston keeps entering to take care of her. When she wakes, he tells her that the Baron wants to see her, but Tiffany insists on seeing the old Baron first, and making the cellar cold enough to preserve his body. She learns that Preston has a talent for healing, but he can’t become a doctor because it’s too expensive. Roland apologizes to her after being told about the plot against Tiffany by his wife-to-be, and Tiffany accidentally says she’ll marry him. They both ignore this, and agree and everything is incredibly fraught at the moment—they must get on with the funeral and the wedding.
Letitia ask to see Tiffany privately, and Tiffany realizes that she needs to have the birds and bees conversation before her wedding. Then Tiffany talks to the Feegle, currently being managed by Wee Mad Arthur who has decided to give up his badge and stay home. Tiffany promises that the Feegle mound will never be threatened again. She’s looking at an old war tapestry in the castle and sees the Cunning Man moving toward her through it. She hinks to burn it, but she wakes up inside the tapestry, in “the traveling” with Eskarina. The wizard warns her that if Tiffany fails to stop the Cunning Man, the other witches will have to kill her or all witches will fall with her. Tiffany threatens the tapestry and the Cunning Man backs off, afraid of fire. Preston tells Tiffany that he was watching over her while she had witch business, and demands that she rest. Back int the city, Mrs. Proust finds out that a man who was supposed to hang broke out of jail in a manner most disconcerting. She makes to grab her broom, knowing she needs to go to the country immediately. It’s the day of the funeral and Granny and Nanny have arrived with Verence and Magrat for no reason at all.
Nanny gets the funeral in high spirits with music and happens to notice Preston and Tiffany, of course. Mrs. Proust lands on the roof with Mrs. Happenstance in tow along with her apprentice Miss Cambric, and warns Tiffany that the Cunning Man now has a body to control. She also recognizes the Duchess and knows that the woman used to be a dancer in a music hall. Tiffany invites her to go downstairs and meet the other witches, then finds that Nanny took her suggestion to give Letitia a more informative birds and bees talk. The Duchess is a bit drunk and apologizes to Tiffany for how she’s behaved; Tiffany tells Letitia to go speak to her mother. Granny tells Tiffany that the witches are wondering if they shouldn’t insist on helping her (they’re all here to kill her if she fails), but Tiffany is adamant that she can handle this mess. Nanny says the men came back from the stag night without Roland, so Tiffany tells Preston. She has to leave and fight a monster; he insists on going with her to protect her. Tiffany tells the Feegles they have to stay out, but brings Preston along. They find a drunk Roland in a pigsty, and Letitia comes out too, searching for him. Tiffany tells them they have to do what she says if they want to live, which they agree to, but aren’t happy about. As they run, Preston sets fire to the stubbles. The land begins to burn. Tiffany holds the couple's hands and marries them as they jump through the fire—fast enough not to be seriously harmed by it, but the fire burns the Cunning Man. Tiffany sees him off.
The wedding occurs, and Tiffany learns that Preston has asked around about how old she is (he is a year older). Roland says that Miss Spruce was caught with the money the old Baron left to Tiffany, who tells Roland to keep it with a few requests on her end: that Amber get a dowry so her young man can apprentice to a master craftsman (he made Letitia’s wedding dress); that other young people on the Chalk get the same opportunity; that the old barn on Home Farm be made into a school (where sex ed gets taught) and that Preston be its first teacher, so he can earn enough money to become a doctor; and that the downland be given in law to the Feegle. Roland agrees to all these terms. Tiffany is brought to the traveling again by Eskarina to meet her older self wearing a golden hare necklace. She tries to ask a question, but is only told to listen. Granny tells Tiffany she did a woman’s job today, and that she should start training witches herself soon. The next year at the fair, Amber and her husband give Tiffany a gift—William made her a beautiful black dress. Then Preston stops by to talk to her about his doctor’s apprenticeship and gifts her the golden hare necklace. He asks her what the sound of love is, and she tells him… to listen.
Commentary
The thing is that Preston is good and Preston is smart and those are lovely qualities to be sure… but Preston is the right person for Tiffany because he’s the only person outside her parents who reminds her to sleep and eat. He asks when she last did both and when Tiffany lets him know that she had an hour of sleep last night and a snack the day before, he tells her that snacks and naps are not ways to live—“it’s how people die!”
And that’s a beautiful thing to have in this book aimed at younger readers because far too many of us get raised on romcom love, which is cute, but all about chemistry. Chemistry is great. It makes for snappy dialogue and the belief that folks would climb into bed together. It does not give people any idea of what it means to have a partner in life. Which is ninety percent about helping to keep another person alive because you love them. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s not glamorous or exciting, but it is beautiful.
I am literally saying this as my partner deposits dinner in front of me because I would probably eat once a day without intervention. I forget! That is not my strong suit in a relationship. This is why I’m alive, and it would be underselling to say that I find that considerably more romantic than “chemistry.” Not that chemistry has no value, but it’s an extra, yes? Like a car sunroof. It’s fun, but you don’t need it—you need an engine that runs. And that puts me too close to Nanny Ogg joke territory for comfort, so I’ll move on. The point is, Preston is great and great for Tiffany specifically.
Outside of that, this book is largely about how community functions, and when and how it doesn’t, and how we can protect ourselves from its dysfunction when it arises. One of the places where this begins to stick out to me is in Tiffany watching Nanny Ogg do what she does best at the funeral, and musing over how she doesn’t have those skills: I wanted to learn fire and pain, but I should have learned people.
Tiffany is only half-right in this instance because every witch has her strengths, but the acknowledgment that knowing people is a precious skill is still central to a lot of the themes here. Nanny is the key example there, because she’s essentially a Bacchus-ian retrofit unto herself. She accesses people through wine, women, and song, which is more fun in this instance because she’s the woman in question, or she’s giving other women tips on how to be the women in question (i.e. her helping Letitia). She knows people by doing her best to engage them where they’re at their best, in moments of merriment, laughter, and connection.
But there are ways of understanding that lean toward solemnity, and Tiffany sees that’s a different sort of magic at the funeral:
It was magic; magic had turned a hall full of people who mostly did not know very many of the other people there into human beings who knew they were among other human beings and, right now, that was all that needed to matter.
It’s a perfect description of those moments, which often do feel like magic. The places where we come together because we know we’re all the same. Even if they don’t last, they have a resonance, a different wavelength. We need them to feel safe.
Just like Tiffany’s first story, there’s couching emotions and attributes that people often frame as selfish or undesirable as heroic traits. Tiffany thinks that to beat the Cunning Man, she has pride, trust, fear, and fire. Pride and fear in particular would normally not rank high on a heroic list, but they should—particularly against a foe like the Cunning Man, who is a codified representation of hatred of the other made whole. Tiffany has no kindness in her heart for this figure, unlike the hiver or the Wintersmith, because Pratchett philosophy makes no room for this kind of bigotry—he aligns it with poison, and knows that it never fully dies:
[…] and though we will never be rid of you, we can certainly make your life hell.
That is the way you combat it. You destroy it with extreme prejudice. There’s no “tolerate my intolerance” argument to be had here. Only destruction without pity or sorrow. And it’s good that Tiffany is always shown to be unyielding in the face of that manner of monstrosity. That we can count of her to live up to Granny Aching’s example in every way.
Asides and little thoughts:
On omens: And it wasn’t good manners, she was sure, to ask for a second sign to tell you if the first sign wasn’t just a coincidence, was it? That’s fair though, they should come in triplicate, some of us are nervous.
It's just really important that Tiffany asks for sex education in her school, I'm just saying. Real damn important to frame that here as normal and net good and needed.
After Preston talks of loving the word susurration, as Tiffany does, it pops up several times in the narrative as we go.
Pratchettisms:
There must have been reservoirs in Letitia. She was never more than a teacup away from a tear.
It was one of those things that the brain files under “something I would rather not have seen.”
“Miss Aching, you are showing an almost sinful self-assurance and overwhelming pride and certainty, and maybe I say that I wouldn’t expect anything less of a witch.”
“Can’t abide broomsticks,” she said. “They give me calluses in places where nobody should have calluses.”
We pride ourselves on making a good history of our lives, a good story to be told.
Next week we start the final Watch book: Snuff. We’ll read up to:
He thought Ah, yes, contraband! and, feeling cheerful, and hopeful for the future, he gently closed the window and went back to bed. [end-mark]
Warning! This post contains spoilers for the ending of Season Three of The Umbrella Academy. Do not read further if you don’t wish to be spoiled.
At the end of Season Three of the Netflix show, we saw the Hargreeves once again in a new reality. This timeline, however, sees them without powers, something that showrunner Steven Blackman told Entertainment Weekly will be a throughline of the upcoming final episodes.
“The first place I started with Season Four was: What happens if you were once a superhero and then suddenly you’re not?” he told Entertainment Weekly. “What does that do to you? Not only as an individual, but what is the family dynamic when suddenly they find themselves normal? I think it’s a challenge for all of them. What might’ve brought them together initially is the fact that, as a dysfunctional family, they found some connection in their abilities. With those superpowers stripped away, who are they as a family?”
Blackman also said that Viktor, played by Elliot Page, will be the one who adjusts best to the new state of affairs. “Viktor is probably the one sibling who is most comfortable in his skin in Season Four,” he said. “He’s doing better than any of the other siblings in terms of adjusting to his new life. He’s the most accepting of their new reality.”
The showrunner also teased that Season Four will be full of “madness and chaos,” and that the end of the third season gives a clue as to what we’ll see in the upcoming episodes.
“Fans may remember that at the end of Season Three, Hargreeves wasn’t able to finish programming the Universe Machine, and Allison still pressed the button anyway,” Blackman said. “So we’re definitely in an altered version of our now. We’re back to the time period they’ve always wanted to get back to! At least they start in the right year, but we know that something isn’t right. My little teaser is clearly Hargreeves didn’t finish what he needed to do before Allison pressed the button, so that is going to have repercussions to their timeline.”
The fourth and final season of The Umbrella Academy starts streaming on Netflix on August 8, 2024. [end-mark]
The spinoff of the popular series The Librarians has finally gotten a release date. The new show, accurately called The Librarians: The Next Chapter will start turning its pages this fall on the CW.
The network announced at their upfront presentation today that the show would air right after the final season of Superman & Lois on Thursdays at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT. We unfortunately don’t know when exactly in the fall the show will start, so it’s best to set a calendar reminder to go off after Labor Day to find out when that first Thursday will roll around.
Here’s the synopsis of the new show:
The Librarians: The Next Chapter is a spinoff of the original TV series The Librarians, which followed the adventures of the custodians of a magical repository of the world’s most powerful and dangerous supernatural artifacts. The new series centers on Vikram (Callum McGowan), a “Librarian” from the past, who time traveled to the present and now finds himself stuck here. When he returns to his castle, which is now a museum, he inadvertently releases magic across the continent. He is given a new team to help him clean up the mess he made, forming a new team of Librarians.
In addition to McGowan, Jessica Green will also star in the show as a Guardian named Charlie Cornwall. Other cast members include Olivia Morris as Lysa Pascal, the Scientist and Bluey Robinson as Connor Green, the Historian. Dean Devlin (The Ark) is on board as showrunner.
We also have two first look photos of the show, which you can see above and below. [end-mark]
Once upon a time, a mom and her two sons lived in a house in the woods, and never went into the woods without holding onto a rope for dear life—until the kids got old enough to ask questions about this odd state of affairs. That, in essence, is the premise of Never Let Go, the latest film from director Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes). Momma (Halle Berry) and her kids Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) seem to be living way, way off-grid—in fact, maybe there isn't even a grid anymore. Maybe the world ended. Maybe there are monsters in the woods that will get them if they ever let go of the rope.
Maybe not.
It's a little hard to look at a premise like this and not think things like, "Wait, how many people died before they figured out the rope thing?" which then might lead a person to think, "Ah, yes, I see, the rope thing is not a real thing." The trailer does seem to show monsters and creepy creatures (too many hands! too many hands!) but trailers are notoriously tricksy. As an Entertainment Weekly piece asks:
What, exactly, are those monsters? Are the snakes we glimpse in the trailer real or symbolic? Berry, understandably, doesn't want to spoil what's to come when asked about what caused the end of the world. "That's a big reveal of the movie that we shouldn't give away," she says, coyly.
At any rate, Never Let Go joins a whole host of movies in which cabins are not a good place to be (Cabin in the Woods, Knock at the Cabin) and/or moms are having a really rough go of it post-(maybe) apocalypse (A Quiet Place, Bird Box). You can visit this terrifying cabin in theaters on September 27th.[end-mark]
This season of Discovery has been a mix of two storylines. There’s the search for the Progenitor tech that led to the creation of all humanoid life in the galaxy (spinning off of the revelations in TNG’s “The Chase”), which has been a fairly standard but quite enjoyable quest narrative, as Burnham and the gang use their big brains to search for clues that will lead them to putting all the literal puzzle pieces together to find the tech.
And then there’s Moll, L’ak, and the Breen. This week mixes both storylines, and also introduces us to the Archive, a traveling library that exists outside of any political structure, and which is currently located in the Badlands. Introduced in DS9’s “The Maquis, Part II” as a turbulent, dangerous region wracked with plasma storms, it’s where Voyager was lost in “Caretaker,” and it’s where the Archive is located now.
The Archive is where the last of the clues is, placed there by the Betazoid scientist, Marina Derex, in a volume entitled Labyrinth of the Mind. Not surprisingly, given that Betazoids are telepathic, the clue involves ENTERING BURNHAM’S BRAIN!
Credit: CBS / Paramount+
That’s the fun part of the plot. Burnham is in a mindscape created by Derex but shaped by her own subconscious. The avatar that helps her through the mindscape looks like Book (though Book is dressed like Hy’Rell, the librarian who serves as Discovery’s guide through the Archive), and the mindscape itself is the Archive. The avatar gives Burnham some vague assistance, but she has to find her own way. She takes many a wrong turn—including believing it relates to the history around the Dominion War when the gaggle of scientists were examining the Progenitors, and also thinking it’s a maze she has to find her way through—before finally figuring it out. The fact that they’re in the Archive is a clue: The mindscape is dictated by what Burnham is thinking about, and what she’s focused on primarily is the current mission. So of course it took her to a place that looks like her current mission. The avatar looks like Book because she trusts him, though he acts nothing like Book (credit to David Ajala, who does a lovely job of playing not-Book when they ENTER BURNHAM’S BRAIN, as well as Book in the real world).
Eventually, Burnham admits that she’s scared, specifically of failure. Which makes perfect sense, especially given that the first time we saw the character of Michael Burnham she failed pretty spectacularly and she’s been trying to make up for that failure ever since. But that’s what convinces the avatar that she’s worthy to get the final clue: the self-awareness and knowledge of her own limitations. So the avatar tells her where the final puzzle piece is and also gives her one other piece of knowledge, which they cut away from before we can hear what it is.
Burnham wakes up only to find that all hell has broken loose. The Breen showed up in the Badlands, and—once it was clear that the Breen had no intention of moving peacefully through the Archive—were denied entry. And so they’re forcing their way in.
One part of that plot is fun: Rhys (in charge because Rayner beamed over to the Archive with Culber once Burnham fell unconscious) has Discovery hide in the plasma storms in the hopes that the Breen won’t know they’re there. Then Reno, Tilly, and Adira work their technobabble magic to foil the Breen as much as possible.
Nonetheless, the Breen do get a boarding party on board, and Rayner and Book have to hold them off while Culber protects Burnham’s unconscious form, and then Burnham leads them to the clue, getting off the Archive in the nick of time.
I do want to pause here to sing the praises of Elena Juatco, who does a wonderful job playing Hy’Rell. As the child of librarians, and someone whose first job out of college was as an assistant editor for Library Journal magazine, I really loved seeing a librarian be a helpful and heroic character who is devoted to the preservation of knowledge, but not to an absurdist degree. As an example, they invite Book to join Burnham on the away team because they have an artifact from Kwejian. They want Book to provide context for it, and also offer to let him take it with him. My wife kept thinking that the Archive was going to be some sinister thing where they’d imprison Book in order to preserve him as the last survivor of Kwejian, and I’m so glad she was wrong, as that would’ve been tiresome. Instead, the Archive is what a library should be, and it’s a wonderful thing.
It would’ve been nice if it had a few more ways of defending itself beyond “good shields and hide in the Badlands,” as I can’t imagine that the Breen Primarch is the first person to get cranky at them.
Credit: CBS / Paramount+
Which leads us to where the episode falls down, and again, it’s the Breen.
On the one hand, we get a great visual of the Breen all tapping their glowy staffs on the deck of the dreadnought in unison. It’s very effective and menacing in the same way that the Cybermen moving in stompy concert with each other on Doctor Who is effective. The thing is, on Who it conveys their menace as a united, mechanized front, where individualism is subsumed. Which would make sense for the Breen, given that they all look the same on the outside.
Except the entirety of the plot line involving them is all about individuals: the Primarch being a dick, L’ak being the scion, Moll being his wife and therefore the only connection to the scion, and the scion being the only descendant of the monarch that has the legitimate claim.
Every cliché is hit in this: the Primarch going back on his word because he’s the bad guy. And of course he made a special oath that no Breen would ever go back on, because societies in fiction always have some stupid-ass oath that they never go back on that is necessary to make the plot work, and half the time the bad guy goes back on the unbreakable oath to show what a piece of shit he is and I’m falling asleep just describing this incredibly tired storyline.
Worse, when Moll tries to call the Primarch out on his dickishness, a fight ensues, and she kills him and then takes over, and I did not buy that for a nanosecond.
One of the biggest problems with this season is that the ticking clock/competition for our heroes has not been that compelling. Moll and L’ak are just a couple of ex-Couriers who should not be able to run rings around an entire starship full of smart people. Nor should one of them be able to put herself into a position of power on a Breen dreadnought. I’ve said all along that Moll and L’ak reminded me of Honey Bunny and Pumpkin from Pulp Fiction. And that’s the problem—the characters played by Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth in that 1994 film would never have taken over, say, an Army regiment. Hell, those two characters were pretty much undone by bumping into two only-very-slightly smarter criminals in the diner they were robbing.
And that’s the problem with Moll’s storyline here. Ever since the Breen showed up looking for the pair of them, she’s been punching way above her weight class and the scripts have insisted that she win those fights, and I have yet to actually buy it. At one point in “Labyrinths” Moll casually mentions that Discovery has the other four clues, which is the first time the Primarch even knows there are other clues. At that moment, the Primarch should’ve shot and killed Moll. Which, frankly, would’ve been fabulous, a great twist that actually would make sense. Usually what undoes criminals is getting too big for their britches, as it were, and getting hammered.
Credit: CBS / Paramount+
The Primarch is perfectly happy to blow up the Archive, even though it has some important Breen artifacts, even though he swore on the bizarre-ass alien oath that he wouldn’t. So why does he even let Moll live? She’s proven to be untrustworthy and he’s got the bigger ship and now knows that Discovery has all but one of the clues.
In the end, the Primarch confronts Burnham, and while the Breen half of that conversation is tiresome (swearing the stupid-ass oath and then going back on it), the Discovery half is a delight. Burnham agrees to hand over the completed puzzle (though not until after she’s activated it and had Zora record everything it provides, including stellar coordinates), and then creates the illusion of being blown up by activating the spore drive while they’re being fired on and venting plasma.
Discovery now gets to proceed to the coordinates with two advantages: The Primarch thinks they’re destroyed and Burnham knows about the one more thing that the avatar told her before she woke up.
One final note: This is yet another episode without Doug Jones as Saru, Emily Coutts as Detmer, and Oyin Oladejo as Owosekun. I know that the staff didn’t know this was the final season when they wrote and produced this season, but it’s still disappointing that we’re getting so little of these three—especially Saru, who is the best thing about Discovery. Sigh.[end-mark]
The Netflix adaptation of Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem—styled, for the streamer, as 3 Body Problem—isn't over yet. But it's also not clear how much more of it is coming. A piece on Netflix's Tudum says the series "will return for more all-new episodes." But it never uses the phrase "season two," saying instead:
Netflix’s chief content officer Bela Bajaria confirmed that 3 Body Problem will continue to take viewers through the full journey of this epic saga. All other details are under wraps including the number of seasons and episodes which will be revealed at a later date.
This is, let it be said, an odd weird way to extend the life of one of the things we used to call a "television show." Variety's piece about the news has the headline, "3 Body Problem Picked Up for Additional Episodes as Show Prepares to End," which makes me feel like someone at Variety is staring off into the middle distance while taking a drag on a clove cigarette, thinking, "Aren't we all just preparing to end in one way or another?"
At any rate, 3 Body Problem isn't done for yet. The adaptation comes from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss along with Alexander Woo, and the creators seem pleased with the news, telling Tudum, “We’re thrilled that we get to tell this story through to its epic conclusion." Netflix's VP of Scripted Series, Peter Friedlander, got more specific, saying the adaptation "will soar to never-before-seen heights as they tackle the rest of the mind-blowing journey through Death’s End."
Said mind-blowing journey follows a group of scientists as they try to save the world. Or, as Netflix puts it, the show "explores how humanity chooses to respond to its gravest threat." The first season of the show starred Rosalind Chao, John Bradley, Jovan Adepo, Liam Cunningham, Eiza González, Benedict Wong, Jonathan Pryce, and many more.
It'll be back ... eventually. For some number of episodes and/or seasons.[end-mark]
It’s May, which means that all across the internet, artists of all kinds are participating in MerMay—a contest and celebration of all things mermaid-related, hosted by Whitney Pollett and Lauren Barger. The challenge offers an open-ended prompt for each day of the month, encouraging participants to draw (or paint, or craft, or animate) thirty-one pieces of art, stretching their creative muscles and getting in a lot of excellent practice along the way!
MerMay began in 2016 with former Disney illustrator Tom Bancroft, who decided to challenge himself just for fun, inviting other creators to join in. The trend went viral and MerMay has continued, now celebrating its eighth year. The result? An outpouring of gorgeous, unusual and visually-striking mermaid-themed artwork (which you can find on various social media platforms under the hashtag #MerMay).
While I’m not participating in this year’s MerMay, I do like mermaids, and poetry is an under-celebrated art form of its own. So this month, I’ve compiled twelve poems which draw on mermaid imagery and themes. If you’re an artist taking on the MerMay challenge, you may find inspiration here that will inform your art. (Reverse ekphrasis! Yay!) But even if you aren’t participating in MerMay, these poems are worth a read all on their own…
Nobody needs your damn armada. Come hear the truth from me. I'll tie you to the mast, Capitán, kelp-tickle your beard as you sink into the sea…
To start us off, a visceral and utterly compelling tale of the sinking of a ship, based on a real-life event. Bradley packs each verse with fierce, emotive imagery that drags you into the scene, close enough to the action to taste salt on your lips.
Between the imaginary iceberg and the skeletal whale is the stuffed and mounted mermaid in her case, the crudely-stitched seam between skin and scale
so unlike Herbert Draper’s siren dreams…
We come now to dry land, to bear witness to the desiccated body of a mermaid on display in a museum. This poem is dark, dusted all over with the sense that we’re too late—but nonetheless it’s an absorbing read.
My tail transmuted to legs, my voice Usurped; the icy winds, the thousand foot waves; and I With my liver gnawed by mice, danced on daggers on the path…
A poetic retelling now of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale of the same name. Perhaps the best-known story of a mermaid, this tale balances hope on a knife’s edge, doom on either side. That same fraught balance is struck in Aldan’s verse.
“They mustn’t see you.” Your hand pushes me back into the cold. For a second, I don’t know how to breathe underwater. Then I remember again. Riverbed is home. Tides fold over me, smooth and sweet, asking: what could be worth burning your voice out, up there?...
This third poem tells a subversive love story, in verse that will wash over you as gently as a lapping wave. In their author’s note, Fedyk explains: “One of the origin stories in Polish folklore is the legend of a fisherman, Wars, falling in love with a mermaid named Sawa. However, Sawa is a traditional male name; and while calling Wars’ lover by it might be a quirk of folk tradition, I believe it points to an entirely different story.”
Pink seafoam leaves odd gifts for me to find: a puffed-up man-o-war, a mermaid’s purse,
empty lady slippers, Sargasso weed, as if these things could fill my human needs…
“Beachcomber Nocturne” doesn’t deal with mermaids directly, but the relationship it crafts between its narrator and the sea is one which feels almost symbiotic. Read and imagine the soft shushing of waves upon the shore.
GREEN means go, so run — now — GREEN the color of the siren sea, whose favors are a mortgage upon the soul RED means stop, before the cliffs jag downward RED the color of the shore that welcomes…
Another poem which does not speak explicitly of mermaids—but which utilises mermaid imagery in the telling of its story—is “The Toll of the Sea,” named for the first film in which Chinese American actress Anna May Wong starred in a leading role.
A woman walks upon the ocean floor. Her skirt balloons around her legs with the slow grace of a manta ray…
The mermaid of Garland’s dark and melancholy poem is not a literal one, but nonetheless she is ensconced in vivid oceanic imagery. Hold your breath and follow her as she drifts to the end of the tunnel.
Ariel, belle of the sea, drunk on a bar stool next to me. She grieves, says she feels suckered, did not sprout the legs she was promised…
Like Aldan’s “The Little Mermaid,” this poem plays with Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale—although its use of the name Ariel calls to mind the beloved Disney adaptation. This version of events is darker, more dismal, and surprisingly gruesome.
My fin cuts through the bioluminescent memories as I bring the mortal freedom seekers to a place of refuge.
My eyes black, pupilless, & full like our skin The humans hesitant at a Siren surfacing (they have learned well)…
“Railroad del Mar,”by Afrolatine Caribbean poet Lysz Flo, is about more than mermaids, though Flo’s use of mermaid-like imagery lends the tale it weaves—of battles, vengeance and the quest for freedom—a fantasy cast.
“The Sea Shell” by Marin Sorescu (trans. Michael Hamburger)
I have hidden inside a sea shell but forgotten in which.
Now daily I dive, filtering the sea through my fingers, to find myself…
In this short and introspective poem, the narrator dives for shells, hoping to find their true self tucked inside one like a pearl. Their quest is edged with despair, as so many shells look—from the surface—almost exactly alike.
Sweet pain, pleasure sharp, She poured from her harp; Around her we listened in wonder, The wave warbled under…
Penned in 1913, this lyrical poem tells the timeworn tale of a maiden luring sailors out to their deaths. Its rhyme scheme carries the story onward like a raft on the waves.
Dark seas have washed their faces clean of love Or loss or fear, past earthly comprehension. Their bones are coldsleep coral now, eroded By slowly dreaming centuries…
This final, profound and powerful poem puts a though-provoking sci-fi twist on mermaids, blurring the bounds of night sky and sea, dying stars and deep oceans.
Which of these poems is your favourite—and do you know of any mermaid poetry that you’d add to this list? Let us know in the comments below…[end-mark]
We're thrilled to share an excerpt from A House Like an Accordion, a new fantasy novel by Audrey Burges, publishing with Ace on May 21st.
Keryth Miller is disappearing.
Between the growing distance from her husband, the demands of two teenage daughters, and an all-encompassing burnout, she sometimes feels herself fading away. Actual translucence, though—that’s new. When Keryth wakes up one morning with her hand completely gone, she is frantic. But she quickly realizes two things: If she is disappearing, it’s because her father, an artist with the otherworldly ability to literally capture life in his art, is drawing her. And if he’s drawing her, that means he’s still alive.
But where has he been for the past twenty-five years, and why is he doing the one thing he always warned her not to? Never draw from life, Keryth. Every line exacts a cost. As Keryth continues to slowly fade away, she retraces what she believes to be her father’s last steps through the many homes of her past, determined to find him before it’s too late and she disappears entirely.
The first time Papa got me a sketchbook of my own, I carried it around for days, its pages blank, its cover as pristine as I could manage to keep it. It wasn’t pink or sparkly. Its black matte cover showed me it was real—a real sketchbook, for a real artist. It meant Papa believed in me, and shining under the light of his faith, any lines I sketched could only possibly be a disappointment. I clutched my blank sketchbook while I flipped through Papa’s, filled with cupolas and arched windows and low adobe structures, incomplete fragments of stone and wood occasionally interspersed with whole buildings. Some were recognizable, and some we had yet to find. All of them came from the real world, and anything Papa drew from reality bore real consequences. But I didn’t understand that then.
I was afraid to draw in my own book, but the images inside Papa’s looked stark and lonely, and I longed to give them company. He found me crouched over a page with a red pen, my imagined cardinal already half-sketched atop the graphite needles of a spruce tree he’d drawn, and he bellowed at me with a thundering voice I’d never heard him use before. I dropped the red pen as if it were made of lava. I’ve never used a red pen since.
He knew I was frightened, and he dropped to his knees beside me, gathering me into his arms. “Keryth. I’m so sorry I scared you. But you didn’t know what you were doing.”
I sniffed—louder than I meant to—and ordered my tears to stay where they were, burning behind my lashes. “I know I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t draw. Not like you. I’m sorry I ruined your picture, Papa.”
“Is that what you think?” He smoothed my mousy-brown curls back from my face and looked into my eyes. “Keryth, is that why you haven’t used your book?”
“I’m going to ruin it. I’ll only draw something stupid.”
“You’re not going to ruin it. And nothing is stupid when you’re creating something new. That’s how we learn. I got the book for you because you said you wanted to draw together. I was going to show you some things.”
“But I drew in your book, and now you’re angry.”
“I’m not angry.” Papa sat cross-legged on the floor and pulled me into his lap. “It’s just that the lines in that book have a price, or at least they do when I draw them. I don’t know yet if it’ll be the same for you. That’s why I wanted to try it together first.”
I looked at my scribbled cardinal, interrupted mid-beak. “Your tree was empty. Everything in your book is empty.”
“As empty as I can make it, yes. And I still mess up sometimes. Have you ever seen a cardinal in person?”
I shook my head. “Only in Gran’s Audubon book.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“Why is that good?”
Papa stood up and reached for my hands, pulling me to my feet. “Follow me, and I’ll show you.”
We walked through the creaking screen door of our small cabin, and the hiss of the hinge slammed it shut behind us. I followed Papa to the blackberry bushes that ringed the house. The fruit was so ripe that the canes drooped under the weight, surrounded by frustrated bumblebees. No animals foraged the berries, and birds would only swoop down close to investigate and then soar upward again, as if encountering invisible netting that blocked their beaks.
The berries were only for us.
Papa pointed out a determined Steller’s jay, the tufted crest on his head cocked to one side as he puffed out his chest on a ponderosa branch high above the blackberry canes. “He’s planning his next route of attack,” Papa said.
“Why can’t he get the berries?” I watched the jay make another V-shaped dive, another perplexed perch on the branch. “Why can’t any of the animals?”
“Because we’re the only animals I made them for. Now watch.” Papa flipped open my blank sketchbook and grasped the pencil he always kept at the ready behind his ear. I watched the line grow behind his hand, curving into a sketched approximation of the jay more rapidly than I could follow, right down to the tilt of his head. I looked up to the ponderosa branch to compare the likeness, but the jay was gone.
I took back my sketchbook and peered at the shaded feathers, the intricate detail capturing even the minute fronds around the jay’s eye. And then I looked at the eye, and my heart stopped.
“Papa.” I felt my breath quicken, and I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the jay’s. “Papa. He’s trapped.”
“Yes, he is.” Papa’s voice carried a wistful finality as he tucked the pencil back behind his ear.
I kept gazing at the bird on the page. His wings, his tufted head, his curled feet around the branch were all silent and still, but the curve of the page looked like a caught breath, and I could feel his silenced heart trapped in his hollow bones beneath his feathers, all captured in a two-dimensional cage.
“Let him go, Papa! Please let him go!” The tears I’d held back earlier spilled over my eyelashes and burned my cheeks. “He’s scared! Let him go!”
Papa knelt again and grasped my shoulders. “I don’t know how. I never have.”
I was eight, and I was confounded by any reality where my father was unable to do something. Anything. I was named for a princess—an imaginary one, an old family story about a royal girl’s adventures in a kingdom full of saints and angels. But a princess nonetheless. And to my mind, that made my father a king. He was Papa, and his powers had no limits.
“He’s all alone,” I whispered, looking at the bird.
“Never draw from life if you can help it, Keryth. Every line has a cost.”
I touched the shaded feathers around the jay’s still eye, and his expression changed. I didn’t know birds had facial expressions, but there was a relaxing in the tension of the lines—more of a sense of breathing and movement than had been there before. Something like trust. I looked at Papa with confusion. “If you knew he’d be trapped, why did you do it? And why in my book?”
“So you would always remember the most important thing I ever taught you.”
“You could have just told me not to draw living things. I would have listened.”
“You wouldn’t have believed it, and the rule is bigger than that: It’s not just living things. You can’t draw anything from the real world. Or I can’t, at least, not without capturing it com- pletely, just like this bird. But that isn’t the lesson.”
“What is?”
Papa took the book from me and clapped its covers closed, snapping the bird inside, before he handed it back. “Don’t grow up to be like me.”
The John Wick universe is ever expanding, and the latest installment will be a movie focused on the assassin Caine, portrayed in John Wick: Chapter 4 by actor Donnie Yen.
There’s no director attached to the film yet, but the project is scheduled to start production in Hong Kong sometime in 2025. Robert Askins (The Umbrella Academy) is currently writing the script. According to THR, the spinoff appears to pick up with Caine after the events of John Wick 4, where he ended the movie free of the High Table’s shackles.
“Working on John Wick: Chapter 4 was an extraordinary experience,” Yen said in a statement. “The reason these films resonate so deeply is because, like myself, Chad, [and Thunder Road producers Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee] push themselves to create action, fights and stunts that are not only thrilling, inventive and artistic, but also expressive of character, story and emotion. Caine is an incredible character with a haunted past, and I am excited to return to the role.”
No news yet on when the film will make its way to theaters. [ed note: BUT IT CAN'T POSSIBLY BE SOON ENOUGH.] [end-mark]
Natasha Lyonne, whose previous credits include Poker Face(pictured above) and Russian Doll, is set to enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the upcoming Fantastic Four film.
Deadline broke the news that Lyonne is ready to join the already stellar cast, which includes Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/the Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/the Human Torch, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/the Thing. We also found out recently that the Big Bad the superheroes will face is Galactus, who will be played by Ralph Ineson. John Malkovich and Julia Garner have also been confirmed as part of the cast, with Garner playing Shalla-Bal (Malkovich's role is undisclosed).
While we don’t have details on who Lyonne will be playing, her portrayal in Poker Face as a woman on the run who can tell when anyone is lying as well as her role in Russian Doll (a show she also created) as a New York City resident who finds herself in in time travel conundrums, bodes well for whatever part she’ll tackle in the upcoming Marvel film.
We also don’t have any additional plot details about Fantastic Four, except that it takes place in the 1960s. Matt Shankman, the head writer on WandaVision, is in the director’s chair.
Fantastic Four is set to premiere in theaters on July 25, 2025. [end-mark]
Way back when, in 1991, Terminator 2 told us that August 29, 1997, was Judgment Day: the day Skynet became self-aware and took over the world. That day is, uh, a little bit in the past now, but August 29th is still a relevant date in the greater Terminator cinematic universe. Now, it's the date on which Terminator Zero arrives on Netflix.
The anime series is created by Mattson Tomlin (the writer of the sequel to The Batman), working with Skydance and Japanese animation studio Production I.G. Here's the synopsis:
2022: A future war has raged for decades between the few human survivors and an endless army of machines. 1997: The AI known as Skynet gained self-awareness and began its war against humanity.
Caught between the future and this past is a soldier sent back in time to change the fate of humanity. She arrives in 1997 to protect a scientist named Malcolm Lee who works to launch a new AI system designed to compete with Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. As Malcolm navigates the moral complexities of his creation, he’s hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future, which forever alters the fate of his three children.
No casting has been announced for the eight-episode series, which premieres, as noted, on August 29th.[end-mark]
It is hard to know where to start with the blockbuster musical film adaptation of Wicked, which is based on the blockbuster Broadway musical, which is based on Gregory Maguire's very different and beloved book. But the thing that bothers me most, in this second look at the film, is how much it makes me think of the unfortunate Oz the Great and Powerful, a movie which had almost nothing going for it. It's the un-reality of it all, the sense that no one actually lives in this world. It's all just an elaborate set, which is fine for a live musical, which requires a whole different level of suspension of disbelief.
But this is a movie and it ought to look like an immersive world. Instead we have a nonsense train and flying monkeys that look like they escaped from the latest Planet of the War of the World of the Apes film.
Being a movie, it has movie stars. Despite the fact that Wicked is, ostensibly, the story of the Wicked Witch of the West, this trailer is notably more interested in Ariana Grande as Glinda, said Wicked Witch's reluctant college roommate. Grande seems outmatched, though, by the sheer chemistry of Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, the green girl herself. They are opposites, and they'll become best friends, but something is off in their pairing, despite how endearing the two performers are when they appear together in the real world.
As the synopsis—which you don't really need, as the story is all right there in the trailer—says:
The two meet as students at Shiz University in the fantastical Land of Oz and forge an unlikely but profound friendship. Following an encounter with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, their friendship reaches a crossroads and their lives take very different paths. Glinda's unflinching desire for popularity sees her seduced by power, while Elphaba's determination to remain true to herself, and to those around her, will have unexpected and shocking consequences on her future. Their extraordinary adventures in Oz will ultimately see them fulfill their destinies as Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West.
The rest of the cast includes Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible; Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard; and Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero, a prince whose story goes one way in the novel and a whole 'nother way in the musical. Jon M. Chu (In the Heights) directs, and the film has the same writing team as the musical—book writer Winnie Holzman and composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz (who has written two new songs for Part Two).
Wicked, the first part, which you 100% know is going to end with "Defying Gravity," is in theaters November 27th.[end-mark]
First, the confusing bit: Yes, this show was previously called Dune: The Sisterhood. It was called this for years, in fact, and as a title it made sense, not least because the Dune prequel series is based on, or at least inspired by, the novel Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.
But now it is Dune: Prophecy, and it is somewhat hard not to suspect that the Max powers-that-be didn't want "sisterhood" on their Dune series, even though said series is largely about the women of the Bene Gesserit. At any rate, the show stars an incredible lineup of actors that includes Emily Watson, Olivia Williams, Mark Strong, Jihae, Tabu, Charithra Chandran, Jessica Barden, Emma Canning, and Yerin Ha.
The series' logline says only:
From the expansive universe of Dune, created by acclaimed author Frank Herbert, and 10,000 years before the ascension of Paul Atreides, Dune: Prophecy follows two Harkonnen sisters as they combat forces that threaten the future of humankind and establish the fabled sect that will become known as the Bene Gesserit.
Dune: Prophecy has had a somewhat tumultuous journey to a screen near you. In 2019, the series' original showrunner, Jon Spaihts, left the project in order to write Dune: Part Two. In the summer of 2021, Diane Ademu-John came on board as the new showrunner—but later that year she too departed, leaving co-showrunner Alison Schapker flying solo. In March 2023, one of the show's original stars, Shirley Henderson, also left, along with director Johan Renck. Ademu-John still has credit for developing the series, and is an executive producer. But that is a lot of turmoil for a spinoff show with just six episodes.
That said, any series starring Emily Watson as a scheming Harkonnen and Reverend Mother Superior is worth watching. "Sisterhood above all," she says, ominously, while looking quite conniving. No premiere date has been announced, but Dune: Prophecy arrives this fall.[end-mark]
Darkness and shadows conceal a wide range of terrors in ‘90s teen horror, so it would stand to reason that when the moon is full and there’s more light in the darkness, that would be better, right? Not exactly. Sometimes light dispels the darkness but other times, particularly when that light comes from a full moon, it just serves to help us get a clearer look at these horrors—and in some cases, creates totally new ones. This is certainly the case in Diane Hoh’s Nightmare Hall book Dark Moon (1995) and R.L. Stine’s Fear Street Super Chiller Bad Moonlight (1995).
In both of these books, the full moon is a catalyst for power and violence. Dark Moon centers around a campus and community Founder’s Day festival at Salem University. The town and university collaborate to host a week-long event commemorating Salem University’s founding, which includes a kickoff parade in downtown Twin Falls, a week-long fair on the Salem University campus with rides and game booths, and dances to close out the festivities. There doesn’t seem to be any town/gown tension here, with a committee of students and townspeople working together to organize and put on this ambitious schedule of events. The committee is chaired by two Salem University students, one of whom is freshman Eve Forsythe. Eve is intense, in large part because she was raised by a demanding single mother and in their household, failure was not an option. Eve’s father left her and her mother when Eve was nine years old, telling his daughter “this man’s breaking out of jail, and the warden there… says you can’t come… I just hope you have the strength to escape one day. Don’t wait too long, honey” (10). While this is certainly a dramatic and traumatizing thing to say to a child, he doesn’t seem to be wrong. Eve’s mother demands perfection and Eve’s life is rigidly structured, with straitlaced expectations that follow Eve to Salem University, including her mother’s demand that Eve major in accountancy rather than graphic design and Eve’s tightly bound hair, which is a frequent touchstone throughout Dark Moon as a signal of her uptight repression. Even far from the daily influence of her mother, Eve has internalized these expectations and brings this seriousness to her role on the Founder’s Day celebration committee, worrying that “The whole town will blame us if something goes wrong” (18).
And of course things start to go wrong almost immediately. No one really seems to have thought through the challenges of traffic control and parking for the parade kickoff, which causes some early headaches, though that seems an incredibly minor inconvenience when one of the horses in the parade goes wild, throwing his rider and kicking another student in the chest when he tries to intervene. Alice, the girl who was thrown by the horse, dies. The kicked student ends up in the infirmary with broken ribs. While it initially seems like it could have all been just a tragic accident, the planning committee has to rethink this assumption when they find out that someone intentionally tampered with the horse by putting a sharp burr under his saddle blanket. This seems like a pretty good reason to increase security or at least suspend the festivities for the evening, if not cancel the festival altogether, but that’s not the call the Salem University administration makes. When the dean of the college calls the planning committee into her office, she tells them “canceling the planned events will not bring [Alice] back. I have also spoken with her parents. Although they are distraught, they have assured me that Alice herself would have wanted the celebration to continue. Therefore, I have decided that we will dedicate the entire week to her memory, and use a portion of the carnival funds to establish a scholarship in her name” (33). While a memorial scholarship is a lovely tribute to Alice, this all comes together remarkably quickly, over the course of just an hour or two, and seems to entirely gloss over this intentional act of violence.
Wandering through the festival later that same night with Garth Draper, a young man from town who helped catch Alice’s horse, Eve decides to try out the Mirror Maze, though this quickly becomes a much more personal attack, as she is separated from Garth and a low voice begins to taunt her, saying “Eve. That’s not the way out … It doesn’t matter that you’re going the wrong way … Because you’re never going to get out of here … Not alive, anyway” (58, emphasis original). The voice continues to threaten her as mirrors begin to shatter along the corridors, with the damage getting ever-closer to Eve, who sustains a nasty cut on one leg and an impaled earlobe from the flying glass. Despite the deadly start to the festival, no one seems to take this attack on Eve all that seriously and as the week goes on, the unfortunate “accidents” continue to pile up: another student named Boomer is hospitalized when one of the rubber-tipped darts at a game booth is switched out with a metal-tipped one and he gets stabbed in the chest. There’s a mechanical failure with the Ferris wheel, which spins out of control, hurtling riders from their cars. The same stalker who terrorized Eve in the Mirror Maze chases her through the festival grounds and when Eve hides in one of the roller coaster cars, they set the coaster going in the hopes of throwing Eve from the ride. But still, the Founder’s Day festival must go on, apparently.
While there’s understandably a lot of stress about this Founder’s Day festival violence, Hoh also includes brief chapters from the perspective of the person orchestrating this mayhem. As we get a glimpse into the attacker’s perspective, it becomes clear that they wholeheartedly believe that their power to wreak destruction comes directly from the moon. As they directly address the moon early on, following their attack on Eve in the Mirror Maze, “I know you’re watching, Moon. Helping me out. We make a great team. Thanks. I did good, didn’t I? Stay tuned. This is just the beginning. There’s much more to come, I promise” (63, emphasis original). There are repeated, overt discussions about the potential power of moonlight because many of the student committee members enrolled in the same parapsychology class, and there’s a lot of tension between the believers and the non-believers. Eve is firmly on the side of the skeptics, which actually further enrages her attacker, who doubles down on targeting and attempting to kill Eve.
After a couple hundred pages of speculation about who’s doing this and why—is it Garth, the handsome new love interest? Is it Eve herself, having some sort of psychotic break?—it turns out that it’s actually one of the student committee members named Serena. Serena has been mostly in the background of the story, hovering around the edges of discussions, just one face among many. However, it turns out that Serena believes she has used the power of the moon in the past to first kill her mother and later, her best friend, though it turns out that this “power” pretty much boils down to the fact that Serena looked at the moon and wished these two people dead, and then they died, which she wholeheartedly believes is a direct result of her intent. Serena was temporarily off the suspect list because she almost fell off the madly spinning Ferris wheel and while many people might interpret this near-death experience as proof that the moon doesn’t wield the protective power that Serena has been banking on, she rationalizes this by saying “I knew I couldn’t die. I knew the Moon would save me” (200).
Eve and Serena have their final confrontation in the attic of Nightmare Hall. After Serena knocks Eve out and drags her body there, Serena explains that the motive behind her violence was two-fold: Eve made fun of the mystical power of the moon and Serena felt like she should have been the head of the Founder’s Day festival committee. These seem like odd reasons to commit murder, but they’re hers and she might have a bit of a point at least about the first one, because Eve continues to make fun of Serena even as Serena is attempting to kill her, telling Serena to “not be so melodramatic. It just sounds silly” (202). When Eve catches on that Serena is actually going to kill her, she crawls out onto Nightmare Hall’s precariously affixed fire escape. Eve warns Serena not to come out onto the fire escape, which won’t hold their combined weight, and when Serena comes charging out anyway, certain that the moon will once again protect her, Eve gives the fire escape a shake and Serena plummets to the ground three stories below and dies. After this traumatic experience, Eve does seem to gain a bit of self-awareness, telling Garth that “tomorrow, I need to think about some of the things Serena said up there in the attic. Maybe some of it made sense” (211). Whether this will come to anything is uncertain, but there’s at least the possibility that Eve will open her mind to others’ beliefs and be a bit more kind.
While Serena’s belief in the power of the moon is delusional, in Stine’s Bad Moonlight, the moon’s power is supernatural. Bad Moonlight is firmly situated within the context of werewolf mythology, as main character Danielle Verona inexplicably finds herself eating raw meat, growing coarse hair, and losing awareness of where she goes and what she does on nights when the moon is full. Stine keeps the bait and switch going throughout most of the book, giving readers plenty of opportunities to doubt the veracity of Danielle’s perceptions and question her sanity, particularly in how she is coping (or not coping) with the death of her parents and her struggles with therapy and hypnosis, which becomes further problematized when it turns out that her therapist, Dr. Moore, is part of the werewolf pack that is working to claim Danielle.
Bad Moonlight negotiates werewolf mythos in interesting ways. While the moon plays a role in the werewolves’ transformation, it doesn’t seem like a person becomes a werewolf by being attacked or bitten—instead, they just have to be willing to tap into their own violent potential and embrace their inner monstrosity. This is explored through Danielle’s violent nightmares and the rebellion inherent in the central group of characters being an up and coming all-girl rock band that includes Danielle, Dee, Caroline, and Mary Beth. Their music is wild and cutting-edge and Danielle finds herself channeling this intense energy to write lyrics like “Bad moonlight, falling over me, / Bad moonlight, shining down on me” (50), which the crowd loves (or at least Danielle thinks she’s channeling this renegade energy—she later finds out all of the songwriting work she’s so proud of are hypnotic suggestions she got from Dr. Moore). This rough and tumble rock and roll lifestyle also includes unpredictable interpersonal band dynamics, hiccups with gigs and rehearsals, and (horrifyingly) a range of male characters who attempt to force themselves on the young women in the band, while simultaneously claiming to act as their protectors. This virtually unknown band inexplicably has a manager (Billy), a roadie (Kit), and a driver (Joey), all of whom are men and all of whom accompany the young women to each performance (and seem to be at every practice and band meeting too, with the young women given no opportunity to speak privately among themselves about their goals, plans, and dreams for the band). As a result of this troubling behavior, all three of these men are suspects from the very beginning, first for the violent attacks that kill Joey and Dee and later, as leader of the werewolf pack. In the end, the leader of the pack ends up being Kit, who has actually behaved in the least horrifying ways, seeming to genuinely care for Danielle, treating her kindly and not belittling her fears, proving once again that in ‘90s teen horror, the bad guys are bad, but so are most of the “good” guys.
While Danielle and the others cut the guys a ridiculous amount of slack, they don’t have the same sympathy for Dee, who was the sole lead singer of the band before Danielle came on board. Dee and Danielle don’t get along and the default assumption is that this is because Dee is angry about having to share the spotlight, jealous of Danielle’s voice and popularity, and later, because Kit likes Danielle better than Dee. Dee repeatedly tells Danielle that she doesn’t belong in the band and she ought to quit, even physically attacking Danielle at one point. Dee is the least sympathetic and most overtly hostile of the characters in Bad Moonlight and notably, she is also the only BIPOC character in the whole book, reduced to a caricature of an Angry Black Woman, right up until she gets murdered and slashed to bits by the werewolf. When Danielle finally figures out the truth, she realizes that Dee was trying to warn Danielle and keep her safe. This is something almost no one else had the guts to do and Dee died because she tried to help Danielle, which retroactively reframes Dee as a hero, though she remains an underappreciated one, with this reality almost a footnote in the mayhem of the book’s final werewolf confrontation.
Another troubling element in Bad Moonlight is Danielle’s own uncertainty about what she’s capable of, her agency, and her control of her own actions. She suffers from invasive traumatic thoughts, many of which are drawn from her parents’ deaths in a car accident three years ago (though Danielle later finds out they were actually killed by werewolves, collateral damage to clear the path so Kit could claim Danielle as his bride after seeing her at a random rock concert and deciding she was the one for him. Rock music is just dangerous all the way around). Throughout the book, Danielle identifies these thoughts as “violent, terrifying fantas[ies]” (16), which seems a bit misleading, since she isn’t intentionally indulging in these ideas and derives no pleasure or enjoyment from them. In addition to a hallucination of the band’s van crashing over the side of a cliff, echoing the false description she has been given of her parents’ accident, she also has violent thoughts of chasing animals and attacking Dee. These thoughts make Danielle doubt her own sanity and safety, including whether she may be a danger to others and responsible for the violence around them. Some of this odd behavior blurs over into real life, as the full moon starts to exert its influence on her, and Danielle finds herself eating raw meat in the grocery store and licking blood off of her little brother Cliff’s cut arm. Danielle isn’t sure whether or not she can believe herself, so she turns to others to tell her what’s true, putting her trust in Kit, Dr. Moore, and her Aunt Margaret, who actually turn out to be the head werewolf, the head werewolf’s dad, and a werewolf in disguise who killed the real Aunt Margaret to take custody of Danielle and Cliff after their parents’ deaths (Danielle hadn’t seen Aunt Margaret since she was a small child, so apparently this imposter was able to just kill the real Aunt Margaret and slip into her place undetected. I guess there weren’t any pictures of Aunt Margaret in the family albums). Danielle can’t turn to her bandmates for help either, because they’re all werewolves too, turned by Kit to form a loyal pack. There are literally werewolves everywhere.
While Danielle is relieved to learn that she hasn’t actually attacked or killed anybody, when she is captured and surrounded by the werewolves, about to be forced to marry Kit, she actually has to tap into this potential for violence in order to survive. There’s no mention of silver bullets or any other traditional approaches to lifting the curse, just the fatal option of fighting violence with violence. While Billy hasn’t been particularly useful throughout the rest of the book, in this final confrontation, he advises Danielle to “Raise your eyes to the bad moonlight … Go with it. Let it happen … Let the moonlight take you. You will know what to do” (189). While Danielle is still horrified by the possibility of violence and uncertain about what it will mean for her sense of self and identity if she becomes a killer, she doesn’t see any other way out of her predicament. She does as Billy says, which leads to an incredibly odd werewolf fight scene. Danielle turns into a werewolf and bites Kit’s throat, which is pretty straightforward, but the aftermath gets weird. As Danielle turns back into a human and looks at Dr. Moore, “His entire body began to quiver and shake … His arms flew up and his body shook even harder. And then parts of him began flying off … Dr. Moore’s arms flew off his shoulders. His ears flew away from his quivering head. And then his head flew apart. Danielle covered her mouth as it splattered on the ground” (193). They literally explode, with body parts flying everywhere. It’s memorable, but it doesn’t make a ton of sense, and there’s no explanation for why this happens. Their pack leader has been killed and these explosions seem to have an incomplete domino effect: Kit and Aunt Margaret undergo this same gross and inexplicable disintegration, with bits and body parts flying everywhere, but for some reason, Billy, Caroline, and Mary Beth are transformed back into their human selves rather than exploded like the others, grateful that Danielle has set them free from their werewolf curse. Since Danielle became a werewolf because she was willing to give into her violent desires (rather than suffering a traditional werewolf attack and subsequent curse) and Kit is now dead, presumably she just won’t be a werewolf anymore, which seems an almost unbelievably convenient solution.
The power of the moon plays a significant role in both Dark Moon and Bad Moonlight, though this takes two really different forms, with Serena’s delusions in Dark Moon and a whole pack of werewolves in Bad Moonlight. In both cases, however, the belief in the power of the moon is a driving force behind the stories and in the interpersonal conflicts within them. Themes of light and shadow abound, not just in the presence of the moon itself, but within the characters, as they explore the parts of themselves they keep in the darkness, whether that’s Serena’s belief in her own destructive powers, Eve’s shaky process of self-actualization, or Danielle’s capacity for violence. Under the light of the full moon, anything is possible.[end-mark]
