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News The Monkey

Stephen King’s The Monkey Adaptation Wraps Production, Announces Full Cast, Including Elijah Wood and Tatiana Maslany

If you find a mysterious toy in an attic, leave it there

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Published on March 28, 2024

Orphan Black 4x01 "The Collapse of Nature" television review Beth Childs

It’s been almost a year since we found out that Stephen King’s short story, “The Monkey,” was getting a feature adaptation starring The White Lotus’ Theo James.

Today, Deadline broke the news that the project, directed by Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) and produced by Malignant, Aquaman, and The Conjuring filmmaker James Wan, wrapped up production. The outlet also reported on who else will be in the film besides James, and it’s an impressive line-up that includes Tatiana Maslany (pictured above in Orphan Black), Elijah Wood (Yellowjackets), Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth), Colin O’Brien (Wonka), Rohan Campbell (The Hardy Boys), and Sarah Levy (Schitt’s Creek).

Here’s the official synopsis of The Monkey, which hews closely to King’s original tale:

Twin brothers Hal and Bill discover their father’s old monkey toy in the attic, a series of gruesome deaths starts occurring all around them. The brothers decide to throw the monkey away and move on with their lives, growing apart over the years. But when the mysterious deaths begin again, the brothers must reunite to find a way to destroy the monkey for good before it takes the lives of everyone close to them.

In the film, James plays the adult versions of the twins while Convery plays the younger versions. We don’t have news on who the other cast members are playing, though I’m eager to find out.

We also don’t know when the film will make its way to our eyeballs, but given production has ended, it’s looking like it might be later this year or early next. [end-mark]

News Red vs. Blue

Halo Parody Series Red vs. Blue to End after 21 Years with New Feature Release

Who will … win? Can anyone win this?

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Published on March 28, 2024

Soldier in Red vs. Blue: Restoration

After twenty-one years, the Rooster Teeth Halo parody Red vs. Blue is officially coming to an end. In a little over a month, the final installment, an eighty-seven-minute feature titled Red vs. Blue: Restoration, will become available for digital purchase and promises to give an ending to the series that started before YouTube was even a thing.

Red vs. Blue takes place in the Halo universe and centers on two teams of soldiers—a Red team and a Blue team—who are in perpetual battle with each other. Their skirmishes under the questionable leadership of Church and Sarge are tinted with comedic, often absurd, moments.

Here’s the nondescriptive synopsis for Restoration:

When the universe’s greatest villain returns in a terrifying new form, old adversaries, the Reds and Blues of Blood Gulch, will have to set aside their differences to save the galaxy one last time.

Warner Bros. Discovery officially shut Rooster Teeth down earlier this month, so this installment—four years since the last one in the series—will likely be the last project from the studio.

Rooster Teeth co-founder Burnie Burns came back to pen the script for Red vs. Blue: Restoration, with Matt Hullum directing the feature.

“I’m thrilled to return for Red vs. Blue: Restoration and to conclude this incredible twenty-one-year journey with our longtime fans,” Burns said in a statement to Variety.

Red vs. Blue has been a cornerstone of Rooster Teeth’s legacy,” added Hullum. “We’re immensely proud of what we’ve accomplished together.”

Red vs. Blue: Restoration is being distributed by Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment and will be available for purchase on digital, with a price tag of $14.99, starting on May 7, 2024. It will be available to rent on digital for $4.99 starting May 21.

Check out the teaser trailer below. [end-mark]

News Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person Presents a Rather Different Kind of Teen Angst

If being a teenager sucks, being a vampire teen sucks worse

By

Published on March 28, 2024

Sara Montpetit in Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

Once upon a time on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angelus the vampire was cursed with a soul. As a result, he ate more than a few rats, as he could no longer bear to kill humans. Most vampires don’t seem to have any such qualms—but Sasha, the young vamp at the center of Humanist Vampire Seeks Consenting Suicidal Person, is an odd one. She doesn’t want to kill anybody. But a girl’s gotta eat.

Ariane Louis-Seize directs what looks like an odd couple vampire tragic rom-com … maybe? Here’s the synopsis:

Sasha is a young vampire with a serious problem: she’s too sensitive to kill! When her exasperated parents cut off her blood supply, Sasha’s life is in jeopardy. Luckily, she meets Paul, a lonely teenager with suicidal tendencies who is willing to give his life to save hers. But their friendly agreement soon becomes a nocturnal quest to fulfill Paul’s last wishes before day breaks.

Her parents! Cut off her blood supply! These are some truly terrible vamparents.

Humanist Vampire Seeks Consenting Suicidal Person is written by Christine Doyon and director Louis-Seize; it stars Sara Montpetit as Sasha and Félix-Antoine Bénard as Paul. Writing for RogerEbert.com, Marya E. Gates said the film is, “What We Do In The Shadows for people who grew up loving the soft goth girl vibes of Emily The Strange and Lydia Deetz.”

I’m sold. The film is still making the festival rounds and doesn’t yet have a U.S. release date—but we will be keeping an eye out for that announcement! [end-mark]

News Rebecca Yarros

Rebecca Yarros’ Third Empyrean Novel Has a Title and Release Date

The dragons return in 2025

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Published on March 28, 2024

The wait isn’t over—not quite yet. But the many, many fans of Rebecca Yarros’ bestselling, beloved-by-TikTok Empyrean series can at least mark their calendars (or get their preorders on), because the third book in the series now has a title and a release date. Onyx Storm will be in readers’ hands on January 21, 2025.

Yarros made the announcement in a video aired on Good Morning America, in which she said that while she can’t tell fans much about the book yet, “There will be politics, new adventures, old enemies and of course, dragons.”

The hugely popular series began last year with Fourth Wing, which follows the story of Violet Sorrengail as her life takes an unexpected path to the Basgiath War College, where she has to survive vicious competition—and romantic entanglements. Iron Flame came out only months later and immediately joined Fourth Wing on bestseller lists. The series is expected to ultimately include five volumes. Yarros is also returning to her romance (as opposed to romantasy)-novel roots; it was announced in the fall that she’s writing two romance novels for Amazon’s Montlake imprint.

Fourth Wing was picked up for series adaptation by Amazon MGM Studios last year; Yarros is an executive producer on the adaptation, which doesn’t yet have a showrunner or cast. [end-mark]

News War Machine

Reacher’s Alan Ritchson to Star in Action Sci-Fi Film War Machine

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Published on March 27, 2024

Alan Ritchson in Reacher

Alan Ritchson, who you might have seen in the Prime Video series Reacher (pictured above) and who is co-starring with Henry Cavill in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, has signed up for undergoing more elaborate fight scenes on the big screen.

According to Deadline, the actor will star in the upcoming action sci-fi film, War Machine. The title suggests what kind of movie this might be, and the logline—the only other piece of information we have about the plot—supports this conclusion.

Here’s the logline, complete with its grammatical snafus: “In the final 24 Hours of the world’s toughest selection process, a team of Army Rangers encounter a threat beyond their imagination.”

This is a sci-fi movie, so I bet a dollar that this “threat beyond their imagination” is aliens and/or a rogue Artificial Intelligence bent on killing us all. Ritchson is undoubtedly one of those Army Rangers who encounters something beyond the scope of his comprehension and, most likely, does everything he can to murder it first. This is all speculation, of course. Time will tell if I’m right.

War Machine comes to us from Patrick Hughes, the director behind The Hitman’s Bodyguard, a 2017 action comedy film starring Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson where Reynold’s character, a disgraced CIA operative, has to protect Jackson’s character, a hitman about to testify in a trial, from other hitmen trying to kill him. That film earned a 44% Rotten Tomatoes score and Hughes’ 2021 sequel, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, chalked up a 26% critics rating, though the audience scored it better at 79%.

The comedic slant to these films makes me curious whether War Machine will also take that approach. I’m more interested in it if it does, as that tone would be more intriguing and less well-trodden than a grim tale about how some incomprehensible threat is set to destroy us all.

Hughes along with James Beaufort wrote the script for War Machine. The movie is produced by Lionsgate and will make its way to Netflix at some point in the future. [end-mark]

News Among Us

Among Us Cast Now Includes Alums from Legion, Yellowjackets, and Orange Is the New Black

Honestly, cast Dan Stevens in anything, we’re down

By

Published on March 27, 2024

Dan Stevens in Legion sporting a mustache

The adaptation of the mobile game Among Us has added some additional voices to its roster. We found out earlier this month that Elijah Wood, Randall Park, Yvette Nicole Brown, and Ashley Johnson were voicing various guys on a starship where a shapeshifting alien has taken root. And today, we’ve got three more names to add to the list playing characters identified by a color of the rainbow who may or may not be an evil alien in disguise.

According to Deadline, Dan Stevens, Liv Hewson, and Kimiko Glenn are lending their voices to the animated production. Stevens’ previous credits are varied, and include the lead in FX’s Legion (pictured above), starring as a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing dude in Godzilla x Kong, and taking over the voice of Korvo on Solar Opposites. Hewson broke out in Yellowjackets, where they play the teenaged version of Van, and Glenn starred on Orange is the New Black as Brook Soso.

The goal of the Among Us game (and presumably, the show), is to uncover who on the spaceship has been replaced/taken over by a nefarious alien who, à la Mystique from the X-Men comics, can shift to look like whomever they want.

Here are the descriptions of each of the newly cast characters, per Deadline:

Stevens will voice ‘Blue’ — Doctor
Knowledgeable, charming, so hot
Task: physical and emotional care
Fun Fact: also has a doctorate in poetry

Hewson will voice ‘Black’ — Geologist
Stoic, coarse, rock-like
Task: supervising the ore shipments
Fun Fact: prefers rocks to people

Glenn will voice ‘Cyan’ – Gemologist
Healing through crystals
Task: supervising the vibes
Fun Fact: the vibes are bad

I’m into it! The show comes from Owen Dennis and is in production under CBS Studios’ Eye Animation Productions. No news yet on what streamer, however, the series will eventually end up. [end-mark]

Book Recommendations Mark as Read

On Letting Go of the Idea of “Keeping Up”

“So, what have you read lately?” It sounds like an innocent question, but it came with a pile of expectations.

By

Published on March 28, 2024

Photo by Jean Vella [via Unsplash]

Photograph of a bookshelf, looking up at an angle. A ladder leans against the shelf.

Photo by Jean Vella [via Unsplash]

The first time I felt the tiniest spark of competition where books and reading are concerned, I was probably eight years old, thrilled to bits by a librarian’s instruction to put a gold star inside a construction paper folder—one for every fairy tale I read. There were at least two long rows of stars by the time I was done. I was only competing with myself: I wanted as many stars as I could possibly get, and given my love for fairy tales, this wasn’t particularly difficult.

But lately—and by lately I mean the last decade, give or take a few years—I’ve noticed a different sense of competition about reading. And competition isn’t even exactly the right word; it’s not like people are jumping online to yell about being first to finish the next Brandon Sanderson tome. (If they are, don’t tell me.) But there’s no word that means exactly what I see and feel. It’s a combination of obligation, social performance, genuine curiosity, love of books, and a desire to be involved, plus a dollop of early-adopterism and cheerleading. 

All of these things are good, in balance. But they’re also easy to knock out of balance, shifting the vibe of talking about books online from “this thing I want to do” to “this thing we wind up feeling like we have to keep up with.”

Reading itself should be productive, in the sense that it produces ideas and feelings and thoughts and empathy and a lot of other things, too, across the whole range of human experience. The kind of productivity I mean is the quantifying kind, the kind that wants to get to a certain number of books read, or tick all the bingo boxes, or simply read more books than someone else did. Sometimes it arises in the form of a complaint: “Ugh, I’m so behind on my Goodreads challenge.”

For one thing, this is just a branded way of saying “I’m not reading as much lately as I’d like to be.” This is Goodreads inserting itself into your reading life and reshaping the way you talk about books. But it’s also more than that. It’s turning reading into a task, a tickybox, a number of pages or books. It’s setting a productivity framework around something that doesn’t need it. Yes, you set your own goals, but even if you’re entirely self-directed and pay no attention to the norms or the huge numbers of books other people read, some of us aren’t quite so independent. Those numbers influence people. They make reading very fast, tearing through book after book, seem like the norm. 

If you read slowly, that’s okay. If you read very few books, that’s okay too. The secret truth is that there is absolutely no reason to care how many books you read in a year, unless you like stats and numbers and tracking things and in that case, might I suggest a spreadsheet and doing your own tracking, far from the Goodreads crowd.

About a decade ago, I had only just discovered that a person could stumble into rooms where people hung out, discussing books. They were also discussing authors and gossip and how bad the box wine was and how long the subway ride home would be, but they were there because of books, because these rooms were bookstores during author events. I had moved back to New York, which had a lot more bookish events than the college town where I’d been living. I got myself a bookstore job and became part of the book ecosystem, delighting in access to galleys and trying to find just the right book for customers.

It was a world I had not expected to find myself in, and I loved it. I loved the conversations and the enthusiasm and the lit gossip and the people, and I loved feeling like part of it. But there was a weird side to it, sometimes. There could be a sense of just having to hold opinions about certain books or authors, or having to have already read new books. And then the weirdest thing happened: I found myself in a situation where I simply did not want to talk about books. At all. 

This was an extremely strange experience, anathema to everything I’d ever felt where books were concerned. But in the basement of a bookstore, a friend’s friend asked, an intense gleam in their eye, “So, Molly, what have you read lately?”

It sounds like an innocent question, but it came with a pile of expectations. This person kept up with everything. This person wanted to know what they could tick off the list with me. Had I read Big Book X? Had I gotten my hands on an advance copy of Massive Novel Y? Did I have opinions about the books a person in my job “ought” to have opinions on?

I did not, and what’s more, in that moment, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to talk about what I’d been reading in the way this person wanted me to respond. I suddenly wanted to hold my cards, and my books, extremely close to the chest. Reading felt gamified, like a thing where you went down a list of titles and got points for which ones you’d read. This was no longer gold stars inside a folder. This was something else entirely.

This vibe has crept into so much online book discourse. People stress about not having time to read—a fair complaint, but one that has a different tone when the subtext (or text!) is “I’m getting behind.” Behind on what, and to whom? Who is served by all this stress, by reading challenges and goals and lists and shelfies and book hauls? What is it for? What are we getting out of it? What difference does it make if you read a book that came out last week or one that came out last century?

If these things bring you joy, by all means: continue. If you just don’t even notice them: Bless you, I envy that ease! But if, like me, you find both that you can’t ignore the social-media side of reading and find it sometimes overwhelming, and depressing, and makes you feel like there’s a right and a wrong way to read a book, please: Give yourself space. Step away from the internet. Ignore the websites that want you to rate and review art like it’s a toothbrush or a new pair of sneakers. Don’t even keep a list of books read, if you don’t want to. What we get from reading is not quantifiable, not a statistic to earn or an item to collect. It’s an experience, a process, an education, a gift. You will get something out of it whether you read 10 books a year or 100. And no one has to know, either way.[end-mark]

Lambda Literary has announced the finalists for the 2024 Lambda Literary Awards—also known as the Lammys—which recognize work published in 2023. The Lammys celebrate queer writing in 26 categories and seven special prizes, which include two new prizes in editorial excellence and critical arts writing.

Here are the finalists in the LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction category:

  • Bang Bang Bodhisattva by Aubrey Wood (Solaris)
  • I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Mac Crane (Catapult)
  • The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon (Tordotcom Publishing)
  • The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom Publishing)
  • The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter (Saga Press)

Delightfully, Tuck Woodstock and Niko Stratis’s 2 Trans 2 Furious: An Extremely Serious Journal of Transgender Street Racing Studies is a finalist in the LGBTQ+ Anthology category, along with Fairy Tale Review: The Rainbow Issue. You can see the full list of finalists in every category here.

As a press release notes, “The announcement of these 130 finalists marks the beginning of a season of uplifting and spotlighting these authors and their work throughout the awards season, with interviews, events, and other special opportunities to get to know the finalists and their vital stories.” That season concludes with a celebration to announce the winners on June 11th at Sony Hall in New York City. [end-mark]

Column Close Reads

The Artistic Bravery of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin

What are things we don’t want to look at, but should?

By

Published on March 28, 2024

Scarlett Johansson as an alien in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin

Welcome to Close Reads! Leah Schnelbach and guest authors will dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, we take a trip to a rocky beach to talk about a haunting scene from Jonathan Glazer’s film adaptation of Under the Skin.


I’m not a brave person, but I am trying to get better at being brave on the page. What are things I don’t want to look at, but should? How can I get at truth in my fiction? How can I write criticism that people find useful?

When I was trying to think of artistic bravery, my mind washed up on the shores of Jonathan Glazer. Specifically, what I think of as “the beach scene” in Under the Skin.

Under the Skin is the rare example of me liking a movie better than the book—mostly because I think the movie is its own entity. The book (by Michel Faber) is quite good, a dark sociological look at humans and the environment (it actually reminds me, weirdly, of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow) that spends most of its time in the mind of an alien hunting human prey.

But Glazer’s adaptation of the book is a miracle. The way he takes the book’s themes and runs into a direction that uses the strengths of film, color design, sound design, showing us a story rather than telling us a damn thing. When I watched it I felt like I was seeing something new.

And the beach scene to me is the best example of what it does well.

The scene opens with something innocuous, even nice. A dog is swimming in an inlet off Scottish coast. The unnamed alien, whom we’ve already seen prey on several men, watches a man swim a little further down the beach. In a cut back to the other end of the beach, we see a woman standing right at the shore, waving to a man and a baby, her back to the dog. Then the camera’s back with the alien, hanging a few feet behind her as the swimming man comes in and walks up the shore.

Scarlett Johansson's alien observes a swimming man in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin
Image: StudioCanal/A24

She begins what we know is her usual routine: asking him questions that will, potentially, get him to explain something to her—the aliens have figured out that it’s an easy way to get a man to open up—interspersed with questions that seem innocent and pleasant but are actually her way of learning if anyone will miss him if he disappears. He’s wary, but does tell her he’s travelling, alone, from the Czech Republic. As she’s about to press further, he looks past the alien and abruptly sprints off down the beach. The alien looks after him, her face reverting to the blankness she holds when she isn’t flirting for work.

The woman we saw before is swimming out past the breakers to save the dog, who’s been caught in a tide. She’s fully clothed, even leaving her heavy jacket on. The man (presumably her partner) leaves the baby to chase after her, and the Czech man dives in after both of them. The camera stays at its remove. We watch the dog go under, then the woman, as the man desperately takes on wave after wave. The Czech man gets to him after he goes under once and hauls him back to shore, but he’s no sooner let go than the man plunges in again. He goes under as the Czech man sprawls on the beach, too exhausted even to crawl out of reach of the waves.

The couple’s child sits alone on the rocks and screams.

The alien walks down the beach, inexorable. She lets waves break over her legs and boots and shows no sign of cold. She stands over the Czech man. Then she sorts through the stones for a moment until she finds one that fits easily in her fist, and bashes the Czech man in the back of his skull. Just once, just enough to knock him out. She drags him back toward her waiting van.

Scarlett Johansson's alien drags a victim down a rocky beach, past a crying baby, in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin
Image: StudioCanal/A24

She never looks at the baby.

Just this could have been enough. Instead Glazer shows us the alien driving the man back to her house, the man still slumped over and unconscious in the passenger seat. He shows us the silent man, who appears to be the alien’s handler also in human disguise, back at the beach in the dark, gathering up the Czech man’s belongings so as to leave no trace of him. Again, this could have been enough. Instead, the camera follows the man down the beach as he retrieves the Czech’s towel.

The baby is still there. Still screaming. The man takes no notice of it and leaves the way he came. But the camera doesn’t follow him, instead it gives us one of the only closeups of the sequence, sitting squat in front of the baby, watching it sob, try to stand, fall back down. The camera is impassive. We know that no one knows it’s here. No one will hear it over the waves.

A few scenes later, we watch the alien as she hears a different child crying, in a car next to hers in traffic. In another scene, later still, she listens to a news bulletin that says the man’s body has been found on the shore, but that his wife and their child are still missing.

Did someone else take the child? Was it taken by the sea when the tide came further in? Is it still crawling down the beach alone? We don’t know. We never know.

Why did this come to me when I was rifling through moments of artistic bravery like stones on a beach? In some ways it’s the best moment in a very good movie, but it’s also doing something I hate. I hate child endangerment in fiction, and I hate animal deaths. They’re both cheap plays for emotion, easy screws to turn if you want your reader or audience to feel something.

So why does this work so well?

Part of it’s the camera placement. The camera neutrally records everything from a slight distance. It’s not a totally zoomed out God’s Eye shot that would elbow us in the ribs with the idea that some Unseen Other is watching tragedy unfold. It’s not fully the alien’s POV, because her actions are also recorded. It’s not zooming in on people faces. We’re never in the water with the dog or the people as they drown.

A swimmer runs down a rocky beach in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin
Image: StudioCanal/A24

The humans act in recognizable, though slightly heroic ways, the woman going to rescue her dog with no thought for her own safety until it’s far too late, the husband diving in after her even though he can see how bad the tide is now. The Czech man going after both of them, despite already being worn out from a swim in these cold choppy waters. There too—the Czech charges after the family. He’s focused entirely on what he can do, which is get the husband, the closest one, the one who hasn’t been caught between tides or swept into a rock. The husband blindly going back in without even a backwards glance at the man who saved him, or the baby.

The camera doesn’t take on the alien’s point of view as she walks up the beach to the Czech man. It stays back and lets us see that she’s simply pursuing prey. She’s not angry—this is just part of the hunt. And then my favorite moment of all: the rock selection. As the baby sits a few feet away, crying, the alien matter-of-factly chooses a rock to hit the Czech man. She’s completely focused on finding a good rock. She’s not in a hurry, she’s not worried about being caught, or the man escaping.

Scarlett Johansson's alien chooses a stone to incapacitate a victim in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin
Image: StudioCanal/A24

So many other ways it could go: the Czech man could yell to the alien for help. The wife could scream at the husband to go back to their child. The husband could look back at the kid instead of diving for his wife. He could take a swing at the Czech man rather than saving all of his panic and energy for the second attempt in the water. The husband could make the second attempt while the wife was still above water. The alien could use a rock to silence the child, annoyed by its screaming. She could hit the Czech inexpertly the first time, and have to hit him repeatedly to incapacitate him. She could reveal extreme strength (as happens in the novel) and be able to lift the man and carry him easily. The baby could try to walk to her, could hold its arms up to be lifted.

But none of that happens. Nothing is told, nothing is indicated, nothing is underlined or highlighted or italicized. No tip into melodrama or pathos or torture porn. There is only what we see: the tide flowing in and out. The man who abandons the child to go after the woman—twice. The other man who goes in after them, despite knowing what he’s getting into. Who saves the person closest to him, and then is too exhausted to see that his rescue has been undone. The baby screaming with no awareness of what’s happening, only that it’s alone suddenly. The alien watching all of them, waiting to see what happens, finishing her assignment with no fuss or extraneous violence.

A different movie might show us the alien going back for the baby, or calling the police about it. A different movie might show us an alien who listens thoughtfully to the broadcast. Instead there isn’t even the barest hint of emotion. Even when she hears the other baby crying in a later scene, her expression only hints at curiosity—not empathy or pity. The beach scene is only the first tiny step toward empathy with humanity as she watches a succession of people try to help each other and fail. There’s still another half hour to go before she frees one of her captives, and another ten minutes after that before she attempts human food. It isn’t that she hates us or fears us or that we disgust her—we are precisely as interesting as the ant she observes in the opening scene, the fly she watches later, the dog swimming out into the waves.

The water flows, the waves crash, the cliffs loom over the tragedy. Nature doesn’t care that these people and their dog are dying. It doesn’t care about the terrified baby. It doesn’t care that an alien has come to Earth and is standing by and watching it all. Nature is implacable, unreasonable, unswayable. The sun goes on shining, the water goes on flowing.

Glazer keeps his camera back and observes. He neither holds our hands (the camera is going to sit right there and watch the baby cry, and there’s nothing we can do about that except close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears), nor pats our heads (the radio bulletin doesn’t give us the happy news that the baby was saved, at least). By staying impassive and allowing cause and effect to play out, he creates a gap between us and the movie. We can fill that gap with emotions, empathy, sorrow, anger, a sense of futility—or we can balk and reject the film. It’s an act of artistic bravery to trust the audience to pay attention and come all the way to him, rather than meeting us halfway.[end-mark]

News Star Trek 4

There’s a New Screenwriter for the Star Trek Movie That May or May Not Happen Someday

Please, just let us boldly go already

By

Published on March 27, 2024

Chris Pine in Star Trek Beyond on bridge of the Enterprise

While Star Trek is doing great on the small screen, its theatrical existence has been paltry of late. And by “of late” I mean that it’s been eight years since Star Trek Beyond, and Paramount has yet to create the long-promised fourth film starring that film’s cast. In 2019, Noah Hawley was going to direct it, but then that version of the film was put on hold.

For a while, WandaVision’s Matt Shakman was set to direct Star Trek 4, but then he jumped ship for Marvel’s Fantastic Four. In 2022, producer J.J. Abrams announced that the fourth film would for sure star the whole main cast from the previous three films, but reportedly the cast had not yet even begun talks with the studio about said film.

(And none of this is even taking into account the time that Quentin Tarantino said he wanted to make a Star Trek, or the scrapped concept for a film in which Chris Pine’s Kirk would somehow re-encounter his dead father, or the other Star Trek film which actually is in the works, which will somehow be an origin story for the whole franchise, maybe.)

But hark, a new screenwriter approacheth! Variety has a big story about the entire Trek universe, and hidden in that story is a new detail about what is apparently being called “the final chapter” for Pine’s crew. Steve Yockey, co-creator of The Flight Attendant and a writer on Supernatural, is now tackling the screenplay.

There are zero plot details, of course. But it might be promising that a new screenwriter is at least on board the Enterprise.

(For The Next Generation fans, Variety has an intriguing detail about Section 31: In the Michelle-Yeoh starring spinoff movie, Kacey Rohl is playing “a young Rachel Garrett.” Make of that what you will!) [end-mark]

News Kinds of Kindness

Here’s a Mysterious Trailer for the Next Yorgos Lanthimos Movie

Yorgos Lanthimos-Emma Stone wonder twin powers, activate!

By

Published on March 27, 2024

Hong Chau in Kinds of Kindness

If Yorgos Lanthimos becomes a household name, the world will be a better place for it. The director of a whole lot of fascinating films—Dogtooth, Poor Things, The Favourite—has reteamed with star Emma Stone (fresh from her Oscar win for Poor Things) for Kinds of Kindness, a movie that may or may not have any fantastical elements, but is almost definitely bound to be fantastic.

The synopsis is not hugely forthcoming:

Kinds of Kindness is a triptych fable, following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.

The trailer is full of extremely brief and intriguing scenes that tell us basically nothing—the same goes for Stone’s brief bit of dialogue. But they add up to an unnerving feeling (and the song choice is great).

Stone stars in the film alongside her Poor Things colleagues Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley; The Favourite‘s Joe Alwyn; and Lanthimos newcomers Hong Chau (The Menu), Mamoudou Athie (Archive 81), Jesse Plemons (Black Mirror), and Hunter Schafer (Euphoria).

What is especially intriguing, at least if you are a fan of Lanthimos’s delightfully weird earlier film Dogtooth, is that the script is a collaboration with Efthimis Filippou, Lanthimos’s writing partner for Dogtooth, Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Lobster.

Kinds of Kindness is in select theaters June 21st. [end-mark]

Book Recommendations Reading the Weird

To Catch a Monster: Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Eye and Tooth”

Humans are often more monstrous than the monsters…

By ,

Published on March 27, 2024

Cover of Out There Screaming, an anthology of Black Horror from Jordan Peele

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 Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Eye and Tooth,” first published in 2023 in Jordan Peele’s Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

“First class ain’t what it used to be, so it’s not like you’re missing out.”

Zelda and Atticus Credit are flying coach to Dallas, Texas. Their clients used to fly them first class, eager to get rid of “whatever awful horror they’d conjured up.” Take the golf pro who shot his ex-wife to Swiss cheese, but she kept getting back up. He flew them first class, but then tried out an internet remedy of salting her undying corpse. That got his face eaten off before they even arrived. True hunters know it takes grave dirt to keep ghouls down.

Lately the internet provides more reliable information, so people are DIY-dispelling their monsters, however crudely. So, though the Credits can handle visitations from haints and river spirits to poltergeists, business isn’t great. And it’s a family business: every generation in the Credit family has been blessed with gifts that enable them to fight the world’s evils. Atticus has what Mama calls the Eye, the ability to live in two worlds, “Ours and Theirs.” Zelda’s is the Tooth to his Eye, the dark to his light.

From the airport, Zelda drives their rented truck through a thunderous deluge into increasingly flat and empty cow country. A dirt road leads them to an American-Gothic three-story backed by derelict farm equipment and a yellowed cornfield. “Some real Children of the Corn shit,” Zelda mutters. Atticus rouses himself, coming into “focus.” Zelda asks if he feels anything. Could be, Atticus replies, but it could also be Zelda’s “energy” interfering.

Their client, an older woman named Dolores Washington, greets them curtly and leads them to dinner. Lanky Atticus helps himself. Zelda passes. Even if she did eat things like the offered red beans and cornbread, something feels is off-putting. Also, the dining room’s packed with displays of dolls: porcelain, paper, vinyl, even corncob dolls in gingham dresses. Haughtily, Washington claims not to be a “collector” but a “creator.” Either way, Zelda doesn’t like the dolls. She likes less how Washington treats a six or seven year-old girl in a metal leg brace who comes into the room, to be dismissed with a sharp reprimand.

Washington says she’s heard the Credits are “real deal Black folks. Root workers and hoodoo queens.” Her grandmother worked with herbs, but what the Credits have is “power in [the] blood.” She challenges Atticus, their “Eye,” to divine her trouble. He tries but shakes his head, and grudgingly Washington describes a presence in the cornfield that’s been killing animals and screaming at night. She’s sure it’s no fox or cougar, though she won’t admit to actually seeing it. Zelda decides that, in spite of the continuing storm, she’ll investigate at once. Washington invites Atticus to bed down in her guestroom. Though Zelda hoped he could deploy his Eye during her absence, she sees he looks tired, even wan, and makes no protest. From the guestroom window, Zelda spots something moving in the cornfield as if on all fours.

Outside she meets the little girl from the dining room, rain-drenched and mute. She gestures for Zelda to follow her into the corn. Feeling “this kid ain’t just a kid,” Zelda complies. Soon they find a freshly killed and mangled animal. At last the girl speaks, one word: “Hungry.” Something sure was. Afraid it might still be nearby, Zelda brings the girl back inside.

Next morning, Zelda leaves Atticus still asleep and goes to the town hardware store for trapping supplies. Hoping for background information, she chats with the clerk. He’s glad to gossip. Rumor was that Dolores’s grandmother did away with Dolores’s abusive father. Dolores herself has become famous for her corncob dolls: among pictures of town celebrities is one showing Dolores with a child-sized doll adorned with a blue ribbon. But then Dolores’s granddaughter got her foot snapped off in an old animal trap and bled to death in the cornfield. With her daughter estranged, Dolores has been all alone out there.

Puzzle pieces begin snapping together in Zelda’s mind. The little girl. Washington’s talk about power in the blood. Atticus’s post-dinner somnolence. She races back to the farmhouse. A dead granddaughter couldn’t survive on random animal kills. She’d need what all revenants need: a human, especially a powerful one.

Washington’s not around, but the girl is upstairs on the bed beside Atticus, her mouth encrusted with his blood. Her leg brace is off, exposing a limb missing below the knee and corn husks protruding from her pants cuff. “Hungry,” the girl whispers. Before Zelda can act, a wooden knitting needle skewers her in the back. Washington cries that she won’t lose her grandchild!

Zelda spits back that Washington can’t have Atticus, and didn’t Washington’s granny tell her that magic always comes in twos, Light and Dark? She calls up her power, the same as runs in Atticus but “bent different.” Her fangs descend, her nails sharpen, and she roars as she rips out the knitting needle and feels her pain turn to clarifying exhilaration. Washington screams, but her raised hands can’t ward off “what’s next,” for now Zelda’s hungry, too.

The rain has stopped when Atticus, bandaged and still chalky from blood loss and Washington’s poisoned beans, makes it out to the truck. He looks at the little girl who sits beside Zelda, playing with a paper doll. Zelda says she can’t leave the girl alone. But there are rules: she’s told the kid no eating until they get home and Zelda can teach her how to hunt “proper.”

Atticus grunts, but Zelda knows he won’t fuss. Like Zelda, he knows that “sometimes the best monster hunters are monsters themselves.”

The Degenerate Dutch: “Granny told me about your family. Real deal Black folks.” And, therefore, expendable.

Weirdbuilding: Folk magic runs all through this story, from Zelda’s family to Washington’s Granny—both the supernatural kind of magic, and the practical kind that whips up tonics to “cure” abusive husbands.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

There was a period when my gamemaster refused to set role-playing scenarios past about 1999. Cell phones, he felt, were the bane of plot—if you can call for help at any time, or find out how the other half of your split party is doing, where’s the pressure to solve the problem yourself? Eventually he got over it—by the time smartphones came along, with the internet in your pocket, we all knew the shivers brought on by low battery and lack of signal. Then there’s the modern gothic surrealism of disinformation bubbles, of the internet as portal to the uncanny—or Zelda’s (no relation) complaint that YouTube videos take work away from traditional practitioners, with only a small chance of getting your face eaten. Maybe that irritation with modern technology is why she doesn’t carry a cellphone—leaving room for anxious races to climactic confrontations.

Zelda, it’s clear right away, only cares about clients getting eaten in-so-far as it interferes with being paid. In general, she has little interest in her clients as people worthy of sympathy. They’re monsters, hiring monster hunters to hunt monsters that they’ve created or summoned themselves. And the story’s final line comes as little surprise. From the moment we learn that Zelda can’t eat airplane food—not for the same reasons the rest of us avoid it—it seems pretty clear that her appetites are not those of an ordinary human. Her dream of waking up next to a bloody carcass seems more temptation than nightmare. So I spent most of the time going “Vampire, ghoul, werewolf, zombie…?” like some off-kilter kid’s game of pulling petals.

She’s a monster with an appreciation for culture, though—not only horror flicks like Children of the Corn with its monstrous rural kids, but classic paintings like Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. That’s “that one with the girl in the field reaching for something she ain’t never gonna get.” Of the model, MOMA says: “As a young girl, [Anna Christina] Olson developed a degenerative muscle condition—possibly polio—that left her unable to walk. She refused to use a wheelchair, preferring to crawl, as depicted here, using her arms to drag her lower body along.” Perhaps Zelda has a touch of the Eye herself, given that she’s about to encounter (and adopt) a monstrous rural kid with mobility challenges.

The most monstrous monster here—as appears to be usual for Zelda—is the client. I once IDed a bad guy way before the Shocking Reveal because he threw a fit about kids enjoying Batman comics, and I pegged Washington the first time she complained about muddy floors. The woman is living out in deep farmland, but has delusions of Armitage-ness. Wanting to keep her granddaughter undead at the cost of strangers’ lives: sympathetic. Whining at those strangers about her pristine floors: nope. (Sorry, yes, I know that’s a different Jordan Peele movie.)

Making creepy corn dolls: also nope. Really, I feel bad for all the innocent doll collectors out there with houses full of staring glass eyes—horror has given them a bad rap. Though the fear apparently comes naturally: my son, who has never seen Chucky or been offered my Tara Campbell collection, consistently makes me hide away decorative dolls in AirBnBs. Ellen Datlow too has a doll-focused horror anthology—and yet. There are people whose uncanny valley is very narrow, and most of them never even once create a half-doll revenant to try and stave off the death of a loved one. Yet another point against Washington.

Final point against: she could have just asked. Zelda turns out to have exactly the expertise needed, and all the sympathy in the world for a supernaturally-hungry kid. If Washington had considered her “real deal” hunters as something other than prey, there’d have been much less need for poisons and knives. But then, if people like her could consider people like Zelda and Atticus for something beyond their immediate utility, they might’ve made a better case for Zelda’s sympathy a long time ago.

Anne’s Commentary

What with the thunderstorm that was raging when the Credits arrived at Dolores Washington’s house, I doubt Zelda thought to check the front porch ceiling. A safe bet is that it wasn’t painted the color called haint blue. The Gullah people of coastal Georgia and South Carolina traditionally painted porches, window frames, and shutters with an indigo-based blue-green. They believed doing so would prevent haints (ghosts and malicious spirits) from entering a house; either the haint would mistake this soft pale blue for the sky and pass on, or would shy away as from water, which haints can’t cross. Eventually other Southerners adopted the custom. Who wants haints in the house? Or wasps in their porchside supper—like haints, bugs are supposed to confuse a blue ceiling for the sky and to preferentially fly towards it.

I guess haint blue can discourage ghosts—my porch ceiling sports the color, and I haven’t had any ghosts yet. Wasps, sadly, aren’t fooled. They pervade the porch whenever food is available. So, yeah, blue paint for revenants, screens for bugs. In case you want to beef up your own supernatural wards, Southern Living has an article listing the exact paint brands and colors to do the job.

But if, like Dolores, you have a haint for a (more or less welcome) family member, keep away from the blue spectrum altogether. Stick to whites, or if you’re trendier, sunflower yellow. Spirits, and wasps, love that color.

What are the odds that the main character in this week’s story would have the same name as the main character in last week’s story? Not high, I’d say, particularly if the name is an uncommon one. In 2023, Zelda ranked 556th in popularity among female baby names. However, according to its Teutonic origins, Zelda signifies a woman warrior. Where monster hunting is concerned, Roanhorse’s and Gladwell’s Zeldas are that in spades. Perhaps the name was chosen for this meaning?

I’m not sure whether Last Exit Zelda’s superpower, or knack, is inborn or acquired, though it’s suggestive that cousins Sal and June develop—or express— the same knack after being exposed to the Beyond. “Eye & Tooth’s” Zelda definitely has a genetically-granted superpower—as Dolores puts it, it’s in her blood. The Credits’ powers define them: Atticus is an Eye, the organ associated both with actual light and with the moral concept of Lightness, the Seen, the Understood. Whereas Zelda is a Tooth, the organ associated with biting, killing, devouring and the moral concept of Darkness, the Taken, the Mystery.

I’ve always been deeply creeped out by these lines from Stephen King’s The Stand: “There were worse things than crucifixion [villain Flagg’s preferred method of execution.] There were teeth [another method of which Flagg was only too capable of employing.]” Tooth-Zelda convinces me further of the terror inherent in dentition.

The Eye and the Tooth share the work of defense, the first via perception, the second via action. Atticus’s ability to see into realms beyond the mundane is a major asset to the hunting pair. It’s also a weakness, for which Zelda compensates with her practical skills and a predator’s heightened awareness of her umwelt. If the Credit siblings could always work side by side, or back to back, they’d be unbeatable.

The catch for storytellers: Unbeatable protagonists make for boring narratives. Roanhorse has a surefire way around this catch: Atticus and Zelda are both monster-hunters, but Zelda is herself a monster. When she’s close to her brother, her monster-vibes can interfere with his efforts to detect other monsters, their targets. So separate they sometimes must. Another plot-nurturing workaround is that Zelda can’t always act on her monsterly intuitions and impulses. Letting her fangs and claws out around clients would be bad for business; in spite of getting all kinds of bad feelings about Dolores, she has to be polite. Dolores is rude and condescending. Dolores raises Zelda’s hackles by mistreating her granddaughter. But Zelda must remember that Dolores has a fat wad of cash in her cleavage. When you’re a monster dealing with humans, you sometimes have to let “professionalism” trump instincts. Right?

Not this time, because it almost results in Atticus becoming revenant-fodder.

Oh well, every system has its flaws. Magic, Zelda tells Dolores, “always comes in twos. Light and Dark. Eye and Tooth.” On the positive side, the Credits know that “sometimes the best monster hunters are monsters themselves.” Who can know a monster better than another monster? A legitimate corollary: Who can empathize with a monster better than another monster? This isn’t to say that humans can’t at least sympathize with monsters. Atticus isn’t happy about Zelda adopting Dolores’s revenant grandkid, but he won’t try to stop her.

Besides, humans are often more monstrous than the monsters. Take Dolores, for instance.

Please, take Dolores, including any scraps Zelda may have left.


Next week, it’s Cowboys Versus Tentacles in chapters 33-34 of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit.[end-mark]

News The Spiderwick Chronicles

Unicorns, Fairies, and Ogres, Oh My! The Spiderwick Chronicles Trailer Gives Us Magical Beings & A Mission to Save Humanity

By

Published on March 26, 2024

Boy holding The Spiderwick Chronicles book

We have another trailer for the adaptation of The Spiderwick Chronicles, and this one features the home that the Grace family moves into (there’s a tree in the middle) and the quest that the Grace children must take on—find all the pages in their dad’s field guide on magical creatures (unicorns and fairies are real!) before the shapeshifting ogre Mulgarath gets them and destroys humanity, as ogres are apparently wont to do.

Here’s the official synopsis for the series:

The Grace family moves from Brooklyn, New York, to their ancestral home in Henson, Michigan, the Spiderwick Estate. Helen makes the move with her 15-year-old fraternal twin boys, Jared and Simon, and her older daughter, Mallory. Shortly after moving to the Spiderwick Estate Jared discovers a boggart and realizes that magical creatures are real! The only one to believe him is his great-aunt Lucinda who implores Jared to find the pages of her father’s field guide to magical creatures and protect them from the murderous Ogre, Mulgarath.

The Spiderwick Chronicles is based on the popular middle grade books by authors Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi and was originally supposed to air on Disney+. Disney passed on the series, however, saying that it was too dark for their brand (and also based on IP they don’t own). Roku, however, picked the show up for our viewing pleasure.

In addition to Slater, the series stars Joy Bryant, Lyon Daniels, Noah Cottrell, Mychala Lee, Jack Dylan Grazer, Alyvia Alyn Lind, and Charlayne Woodard. It’s co-showrun by Lock & Key and Star Trek: Discovery alum Aron Eli Coleit and She Hulk director Kat Coiro.

The eight-episode first season is set to premiere on the streaming platform on April 19, 2024.

Check out the latest trailer below. [end-mark]

News Earth Abides

George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides Will Be a Limited Series for MGM+

A lone man will once again face a changed world

By

Published on March 26, 2024

Alexander Ludwig in Vikings

The adaptation wheel goes round and round, and once again it’s landed on a science fiction classic about a man existing in distressing conditions. George R. Stewart’s 1949 novel Earth Abides is the latest book to move from “in development” to “actual series happening,” with MGM+ planning a six-episode limited series based on the post-apocalyptic novel. Vikings’ Alexander Ludwig (pictured above) is set to star.

We do love the post-apocalypse (The Last of Us, Fallout, The 100) and we sure do love terrible viruses (The Last of Us, Station Eleven). The official description of the show’s take on these perennial favorite horrors, per The Hollywood Reporter, goes like this:

“Leading character Ish (Ludwig) is a brilliant but solitary young geologist living a semi-isolated life who awakens from a coma only to find that there is no one left alive but him. A plague of unprecedented virulence has swept the globe, and yes, there are a few scattered survivors, but there are no rules. His journey is to learn the difference between sanctuary and survival and to open his heart to love if he is to find meaning in his life after the great machine of civilization has broken down.”

The best part of this description is definitely “brilliant but solitary young geologist.” I hope he really loves a good rock.

The show has as its showrunner Todd Komarnicki, the writer of the movie Sully. He and his team are clearly moving fast on this one; production begins next month, and the show may premiere later this year. [end-mark]

Book Recommendations book review

Above and Below: Two Communities Come to Blows in Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan

A review of Eliza Chan’s debut fantasy novel.

By

Published on March 28, 2024

cover of Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan

In the city of Tiankawi, the tide is an ever present threat, threatening to sweep all away. As such disaster looms, one would hope to see communities coming together, putting aside differences, and helping keep each other’s heads above water. However, in Eliza Chan’s debut novel, Fathomfolk, while those tides are indeed rising, no one can see them for the conflicts of the every day. Humanity is threatened by the rising numbers of those known as fathomfolk, doing their best to shove these beings of magic and myth back in the water. There are the fathomfolk, forced to breathe the toxic waters of a polluted sea and still forced behind human interest. And there are those in the middle, not wanting to pick, but to save as many people from either side as possible. This churn and these rising tides, both literal and metaphorical, are front and center in this energetic debut, as the city of Tiankawi and Chan’s multitude of voices each try to navigate political turmoil, social injustice, and two communities about to come to blows. 

From the start, we have a bevy of characters giving us insight into the various concerns afflicting Tiankawi. Mira, a half-siren woman, has been promoted to a position of leadership in the chinthe, the border guard of the city who help maintain safety—especially between humans and fathomfolk, a bountiful community of water-breathing peoples: mermaids, sirens, seawitches, kappas, redcaps, and many more. With her partner, Kai, a water dragon prince and the fathomfolk ambassador, she does her best to advocate for their peoples and keep the peace. Meanwhile, Kai’s sister Nami, a young water dragon of privilege who is exiled to Tiankawi after a busted heist, is soon attracted to the Drawbacks, a group of revolutionaries dedicated to tearing down the human world and bringing justice for the fathomfolk, who are treated like second-class citizens. And all the while Cordelia, a scheming seawitch, slithers and treads between characters and classes, using her shapeshifting and innate magical alchemy to her benefit, furthering her own personal agendas. All of these characters and their goals begin to mesh together and intertwine, putting not just the city of Tiankawi but all of its citizens, human and fathomfolk alike, in the gravest of danger. 

Buy the Book

Fathomfolk
Fathomfolk

Fathomfolk

Eliza Chan

You can feel the love author Eliza Chan poured into this book on every page. There’s a lot of great East Asian mythology at play in the various fathomfolk brought to life, and the city of Tiankawi feels inspired by a number of Asian cultures from food to fashion to transportation and more. Chan makes the city and the world itself a living and breathing entity, adding to works like The City and The City, The Lies of Locke Lamora, and A Study in Drowning, in which the location itself is a character for the reader to love, understand, and root for. As we come to know Mira, Kai, Nami, and Cordelia, we see the city through their eyes, and see the beauty and splendor of the fathomfolk as much as we see their suffering under the law of humanity, the gill-less too terrified of their magical abilities and mythic forms to see them as people worthy of respect and care. The focus on social issues, communal solidarity, and navigating two worlds, neither of which want you, is when Fathomfolk is at its strongest; the movement toward justice can be a thorny one, made more complicated by differing perspectives and violence as a means to an end. It’s when Chan balances myth and place with theme and character that Fathomfolk shines as bright as a pearl in the sun.

However, if you’ve been reading so far and are thinking this is all a lot to balance, you would be correct. There is a fine line, especially in epic fantasy, between worldbuilding and pacing, and unfortunately there are moments here when you can feel one beginning to tip over into the other, and while the writing can work, the flow as a whole slows down. On the other hand, there are moments where the story moves along at a quick clip, the pace beginning to smooth, but in doing so, there are bits of characterization or story revelation not quite given the heft and weight they deserve in order for the reader to really invest in either. It doesn’t take away from any of the excellent moments to be found within, but it is worth noting that as much as Chan sticks the landing in some places, there are others where there can be a bit of a stumble. 

But one must ask, does one expect perfection from a debut novel? No. In fact, expecting perfection from any art, in any medium, is going to make your life a lot less joyful. I’d argue that Fathomfolk has the heart, the beauty, and the creativity to make me invested in Chan as a writer, making me particularly excited to see what comes next in this series and in her career as a whole. After all, you can work on the technical bits and push yourself to continue to grow, but you can’t build a heart from nothing, or wring blood from a stone. For all that there were some slow moments or some muddy characterization, there is so much love, energy, and passion poured into Fathomfolk to make this a novel worthy of your time and attention. I’m excited to dive back into whatever waters Eliza Chan wades into next. [end-mark]

Fathomfolk is published by Orbit.