News Animorphs

’90s Book Fair Kids Rejoice: Disney+ Is Adapting Animorphs Into a TV Series

The noted lack of television shows involving teens transforming into horses will finally be addressed

By Matthew Byrd

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Published on April 3, 2026

Image: Scholastic

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Image: Scholastic

Variety reports that Disney+ is developing a TV series based on the Animorphs books in conjunction with Ryan Coogler’s production company, Proximity Media.

The project’s official description states that it will follow “a group of teenagers who uncover a hidden threat lurking beneath their everyday lives, all while juggling relationships, curfews, and the chaos of High School.” While that snippet curiously lacks one of the more notable aspects of the Animorphs books (teenagers morphing into various animals), it does follow the other basic beats of that series and positions the show as more than meets the eye (in this case, high school drama to go along with said morphing).

Ryan Coogler, Sev Ohanian, and Zinzi Coogler will serve as executive producers on the series via their production company Proximity Media. Iole Lucchese and Caitlin Friedman will also serve as executive producers on behalf of Scholastic, and 20th Television will be the series’ studio. Beyond that, little is known about the show at this time.

For some, though, the mere existence of a modern TV series based on K. A. Applegate and Michael Grant’s sci-fi stories is reason enough to get excited. A staple of the legendary Scholastic book fair scene of the 1990s, Animorphs likely attracted your attention with its magnificently dated covers that showcased the various stages of kids like you and I transforming into animals. Those who dared to delve beyond those frequently bizarre covers found the continuing adventure of teenagers who use their newfound morphing abilities to battle the secret invasion of a group of parasitic aliens with help from a friendly extraterrestrial being known as Ax.

Though an Animorphs TV series that ran on Nickelodeon from 1998 to 2000 did an admirable job of capturing the basics of the series (you can check out its notably ’90s trailer below), it never quite matched the spectacle that many likely imagined as they read the 50+ books that made up the original Animorphs run. You can blame some of the translation shortcomings on the woeful inadequacies of ’90s television special effects and their inability to capture the magic of those book covers, but it’s about more than that. Wonderful weirdness aside, the Animorphs books often benefited from a surprisingly dense and dark mythos that elevated all the shapeshifting shenanigans. One imagines that a modern version of that series will pay more attention to the serialized storytelling potential. Failing that, it will probably offer the opportunity to watch a kid morph into a starfish.

No word regarding Animorphs’ possible release date or any other major production details, but we will of course, keep you informed as the situation evolves.[end-mark]

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News The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum

Aragorn’s Hunt for Gollum Recasting Raises Questions About the Movie’s Timeline

When does this movie take place, exactly?

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 3, 2026

Screenshot: New Line Cinema

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Screenshot: New Line Cinema

It was probably inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any more welcome news. The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum director Andy Serkis has confirmed that the role of Aragorn, son of Arathorn, also called Elessar, the Elfstone, Dúnadan, the heir of Isildur Elendil’s son of Gondor, will be recast.

In an interview with Screen Rant, Serkis said, “I don’t know what’s out there at the moment, but I know there’s a lot of speculation, but let’s just say we are recasting the role and we are on the way to finding someone.”

This is a grave disappointment to many. Viggo Mortensen was an unexpected choice when he was cast for The Fellowship of the Ring all those years ago—in real life, the man is blond—but he owned the role so thoroughly that it’s difficult to imagine anyone else in Strider’s dirty boots. It adds another layer of disappointment that other actors from the earlier trilogy, including Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, and Serkis himself, are returning. (They’ll be joined by Kate Winslet in a mysterious role.)

Rumors have been swirling about who might take over the role. On a recent podcast appearance, Wood didn’t disagree when the host mentioned actor Leo Woodall (Netflix’s One Day), but nothing has been confirmed. Woodall looks more like a boy band member than a ranger of the north, but people can surprise you.

Confusingly, Serkis also recently said that The Hunt for Gollum “takes place between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.” We had assumed that it took place during The Fellowship of the Ring, which begins with the preparations for Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday.

This assumption is backed up by the source material. In Tolkien’s Appendix B, which is largely a timeline, the entry for the year 3001 reads, “Bilbo’s farewell feast. Gandalf suspects his ring to be the One Ring. The guard on the Shire is doubled. Gandalf seeks for news of Gollum and calls on the help of Aragorn.”

Not a lot happens for the next several years, until 3009, the entry for which begins, “Gandalf and Aragorn renew their hunt for Gollum at intervals during the next eight years, searching in the vales of Anduin, Mirkwood, and Rhovanion to the confines of Mordor.”

In 3017, “Gollum is released from Mordor. He is taken by Aragorn in the Dead Marshes and brought to Thranduil in Mirkwood.”

The next year, the Fellowship sets out. In the text, the entirety of said hunt takes place off-screen, so to speak, during the early chapters of Fellowship.

So either Serkis misspoke, or the writers are playing with Tolkien’s timeline and moving things about. We’ll find out next year; The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum is set to be released December on 17, 2027.[end-mark]

The post Aragorn’s <i>Hunt for Gollum</i> Recasting Raises Questions About the Movie’s Timeline appeared first on Reactor.

News Ursula K. Le Guin

In Your Spare Time: Ursula K. Le Guin Podcast Brings Her Entire Blog to Your Ears

Yes, even the blog posts that are primarily cat photos

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 2, 2026

Image by Wes Guderian, 1970 | Courtesy Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation

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Image by Wes Guderian, 1970 | Courtesy Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation

In addition to writing seminal novels, Ursula K. Le Guin also maintained a blog from 2010 to 2017. About a third of her posts there were made into the book, No Time to Spare, and starting this year, each post will also get its own episode on the podcast, In Your Spare Time: From the Blog of Ursula K. Le Guin.

Almost every episode/post is read by a different person, and readers include authors, librarians, artists, critics, editors, and friends of Le Guin’s. After reading her post, the reader then shares their relationship to her work and how the specific post speaks to our time and/or their imagination. Some of the readers are David Mitchell, adrienne maree brown, Omar El Akkad, Emily Wilson, Rick Riordan, Luis Alberto Urrea, Robin Hobb, John Darnielle, Darcie Little Badger, Molly Gloss, Vajra Chandrasekera, Becky Chambers, and Karen Joy Fowler.

“Over the years, many readers have told me they wish they could hear Ursula’s blog posts read by her. I do too, but for me, this is the next best thing—to hear so many fascinating people, connected to my mother in many different ways, bringing the blog into current conversation,” Theo Downes-Le Guin, Le Guin’s son, literary executor, and podcast co-producer, said in a statement.

The first episode of In Your Spare Time will come out on April 8, 2026, with new episodes releasing weekly on Wednesdays well into 2028 (an audio trailer is already up, if you want to listen). The podcast was co-produced by Downes-Le Guin, Molly Templeton, and Richard Stuart Perkins.

Check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Libsyn. You can also listen to the podcast’s trailer below. [end-mark]

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News Dungeon Crawler Carl

Seth MacFarlane to Adapt Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl for Peacock

No news yet on who will play Princess Donut

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 2, 2026

Seth MacFarlane image from vagueonthehow from Tadcaster, York, England, CC BY-SA 4.0

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Seth MacFarlane image from vagueonthehow from Tadcaster, York, England, CC BY-SA 4.0

It’s been over a year since we first heard that Fuzzy Door, Seth MacFarlane’s production company, had picked up the rights to adapt Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl books. Today, we found out via Variety that the project is moving into development as a live-action television series at Peacock.

That’s right, we’re getting closer to seeing Carl and Prince Donut’s televised apocalyptic journey… on television.

Here’s the official logline for the project, which hews closely to the first book:

Dinniman and MacFarlane will serve as executive producers on the project, with Chris Yost (Thor: Ragnarok, The Mandalorian, Cowboy Bebop) also on board as writer and executive producer. The project is still in its early days, so there’s no news on casting for Carl and/or Princess Donut. Dinniman did say in a previous interview with Variety, however, that he was confident in how the show’s fantastical elements would look in live action.

“We’re not going to do it if it’s gonna look like absolute shit,” he said. “And they will do CGI testing on Princess Donut and stuff like that. And that’s all I can say, I think. It’s all gonna hinge on what it looks like. But Fuzzy Door, specifically, if you watch Ted or The Orville, you’ll see that they know what they’re doing when it comes to this. So I would say, don’t knock it till you try it.” [end-mark]

The post Seth MacFarlane to Adapt Matt Dinniman’s <i>Dungeon Crawler Carl</i> for Peacock appeared first on Reactor.

News Ally

Bong Joon Ho’s Next Film, Ally, Looks Unexpectedly Cute

Is it a horse? Is it a pig? Is it a squid?

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 2, 2026

Image: ©2026 V8 Pistons Pictures

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Image: ©2026 V8 Pistons Pictures

This isn’t the first time filmmaker Bong Joon Ho has created an appealing creature for one of his films (that would be Okja). But Ally is a new level of cute. Like, begging to be made into a stuffed animal cute. Would you just look at that squid??? It’s about as far from Snowpiercer as an adorable creature can get.

According to Variety, Ally “centers on a piglet squid named Ally who inhabits the little-explored depths of the South Pacific Ocean, harboring ambitions of reaching the surface and one day featuring in a wildlife documentary.”

The description continues:

Director Bong wrote the script with Jason Yu (Sleep), who was an assistant director on Okja. The filmmaking team has extensive animation experience, and includes animation supervisor Jae Hyung Kim (Toy Story 4, Inside Out) and supervising producer David Lipman (the Shrek movies).

Ally is expected to arrive in theaters in 2027.[end-mark]

The post Bong Joon Ho’s Next Film, <i>Ally</i>, Looks Unexpectedly Cute appeared first on Reactor.

News Widow’s Bay

Widow’s Bay Trailer Says There Totally, Definitely Wasn’t Any Cannibalism Here

You know what’s never a good thing in a horror series? A bathtub

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 2, 2026

Image: Apple TV

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Image: Apple TV

The teaser for Apple TV’s upcoming series Widow’s Bay is only a minute long, but it’s enough to get the gist across—and if the sound effects weren’t enough to tip you off, the Stephen King/Stranger Things font is present to ensure that you know this is a horror show, not a cute little visit to a coastal village.

No, the town of Widow’s Bay seems to be less than cozy. But there definitely wasn’t any cannibalism, despite the large poster with a headline that reads “CANNIBALISM IN GOD’S HOUSE.” And Matthew Rhys definitely doesn’t look suspicious when he says he doesn’t think that’s right.

According to Apple TV:

Widow’s Bay was created by Katie Dippold (Haunted Mansion, Ghostbusters), and—unexpectedly—began life as a spec script she wrote for Parks and Recreation. Star Rhys, who is also a producer on the show, cites Jaws as a massive influence on the series. And, of course, when you find weird things happening in a small town in America, the specter of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is always hovering nearby.

Hiro Murai (Atlanta, Station Eleven) directs Widow’s Bay, which premieres on April 29th with two episodes. The remaining eight episodes will air on Wednesdays (with another two-episode release on May 27) through June 17 on Apple TV.[end-mark]

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Books Mark as Read

The Specific Experience of Being Stuck on a Book

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 2, 2026

“The Novel Reader” by Vincent Van Gogh (1888)

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“The Novel Reader” by Vincent Van Gogh (1888)

Five weeks ago I finished reading Claire North’s Slow Gods, and I have been stuck on it ever since.

It is hard to explain what I mean by “stuck,” though I know I’m talking to a bunch of readers, and I suspect some of you may have experienced this feeling too. It’s not as if I’m not reading. This is not the book-slump kind of stuck, where you don’t want to read anything else. After I finished Slow Gods, I read Emily St. John Mandel’s wonderful Sea of Tranquility in one long weekend morning; I did the same with Jordy Rosenberg’s incredible Night Night Fawn a week later. But that has been the only way I can read: immersively. All or nothing! Commit or don’t even start!

It’s not the most functional way to exist, or to read. And somehow it is this one book’s fault.

I’ve been stuck on books before. Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock, to my great surprise, would not get out of my head. That novel is flawed, frustrating, but also ambitious and funny sometimes, smart in that specific Stephenson way—and upsetting. Climate fiction is often upsetting. This one was such a peculiar meld of fact and fiction, reality and near-future, that it messed me up. It felt like my own brain’s math was mathing wrong.

Some books are haunters. Helen Oyeyemi’s early work, specifically The Icarus Girl and White is for Witching, lurk like ghosts in the corner of my brain, sometimes lingering intriguingly, sometimes insisting on their own presence, like literary jump scares. Patricia McKillip’s books kind of all haunt me; imagery from them will appear for absolutely no reason that I can tell. Sybel living alone with her forgotten beasts. A strange coastline from one or two books, a garden from Od Magic.

Slow Gods isn’t like that. Slow Gods is a hook and I am the hanger, just dangling there, stuck. Pondering.

A brief and incomplete summary of this novel: It is about Mawukana na-Vdnaze, who says he is not a man but generally seems fine with he/him pronouns, so I will use those. Maw also says that he is a “very poor copy” of himself, having been through an experience that has left him unable to be killed. He has died a lot of times. It sounds unpleasant. 

This experience has also rendered him able to pilot ships through arcspace, which is the manner of interstellar travel in this universe, without being haunted by the things that linger there. Other Pilots can handle a very small number of trips; their passengers report creeping shadows. Nothing happens when Maw makes the same journey. This makes him quite useful when an ancient intelligence called the Slow arrives and announces that two binary stars are going to go supernova and destroy many worlds, though at various moments in the future for each doomed planet. (It’s certainly not not about climate change.)

Part of the book is mostly concerned with one planet, Adjumir, and the incredible people there, who work on a solution to their planet’s impending doom; part of it is a political thriller that I cannot possibly explain in brief. All of it is about Maw and the way he moves through the world, which sometimes involves defying the laws of physics. And all of it is about people, and hope, and capitalism, and blistering fury at too-frequent misuse of power.

None of this tells you why this book is stuck in my brain, though. That is harder to parse out. It’s character—not just Maw, but his companion quans, machine intelligences that take an assortment of forms. If you give me a robot three-tailed fox, I am absolutely going to love that character, and all the more so because North has thought through their non-human intelligences, given them their own pronouns, their own ways of moving through the world, their own willingness to make their appearance or demeanor more or less palatable to humans. 

They have also thought through people, and the differences that might arise when we are not just on different continents, in different countries, but on different planets. This, I think, is one place where I’m stuck: these beautifully articulated ways of being, ways of living, ways of thinking, some all too familiar (the hellish capitalist/corporate empire from which Maw hails) and some lushly different. North is working through a lot in this book, and isn’t afraid to be didactic about it—but they do so with such grace and passion and smart plotting that it works. The didacticism is intentional and affecting, fueled with rage and love, explored in rich sentences. They drop in an interlude about gender that is as inventive and expansive as entire other novels; they give Maw’s lover, Gebre, a beautiful tirade about how no one is special and everyone is special:

We are the seeds of the forest, we blaze so bright, no life is special. No life is special. No life is special and all of them are. No lover matters more than any other, no story is more important, nothing matters more, nothing matters less, so choose, choose, we choose every day to be more than just ourselves, to live for more than just ourselves, because it is beautiful.

And really, this is it. This is the book: a book about a man turned “special” who isn’t actually special, but has useful skills that put him at the center of things. I can’t figure out how they did it, is the thing. I can’t figure out how this book is compelling, and plotty, and wise and big-hearted and also a sort of experiment in negative space. Maw is the viewpoint character, but he’s not the person that makes things happen any more than most other characters. Things happen, and a lot of things happen to people, and yet it would not be accurate or fair to say that anyone in this novel is passive, or has no agency, because they demand and take agency in various forms. Gebre demands that te choose the way ter story ends. A collective mind makes demands on Maw, who eventually does wind up at the center of some action because of his strange abilities. People work around him and through him, and he observes, and sometimes dies, and then observes some more.

And there’s that ancient intelligence, the Slow, that shows up and makes pronouncements—in all caps, which is deeply annoying, but then perhaps listening to an ancient all-powerful intelligence would be deeply annoying—and yet despite the warning and wisdom of the Slow, people still do what people do. They make mistakes and terrible choices; they act selfishly and cruelly; and they sacrifice for each other and try to make the world a better place. 

And North never forgets about the worlds—the planets, the spaces, the living ship in which Maw travels. (The ship is the actual coolest ship I have ever encountered in science fiction. It takes Dan Simmons’ tree-flying space druids and ups the ante exponentially. It’s beautiful.) Maw gardens; Gebre is an archaeologist; the ship Emni experiences seasons; only in the Shine does nothing seem to grow or change. To everything there is a season, unless you try to capitalist your way out of it. (Doesn’t exactly work, though.) 

North’s people are messy and complicated, their plotting intense and elaborate, their universe infuriating and beautiful, and their book intimate and particular (Maw has many opinions) and expansive. It is a treatise on the different kinds of love, and the ways in which love can be cruel and selfish, and the ways in which every love matters—but not at the expense of any other loves. I feel like I just read the world in a novel, and I can’t get over it. I keep thinking of something Maw says near the end: “I don’t know how to feel so huge and so loud inside, and so small and quiet before the dark.”

How is anything going to follow that?

And so I remain stuck. There are worse places to be.[end-mark]

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News Widow’s Bay

Apple TV Horror Comedy Widow’s Bay Started as a Parks and Recreation Script

One of Apple TV’s most promising upcoming shows began as a spec script for one of TV’s greatest comedies

By Matthew Byrd

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Published on April 1, 2026

Image: Apple TV

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Image: Apple TV

In an interview with TV Insider, Widow’s Bay showrunner Katie Dippold finally shed a little light on the largely-mysterious Apple TV horror comedy that is set to premiere on April 29. While we know the show is set in a small New England town that is desperate to attract tourists even as locals continue to claim that the town is cursed, Apple has intentionally withheld some of the more substantial details about the series so far. According to Dippold, however, that core idea can be traced back to a Parks and Recreation spec script she wrote ages ago.

“This is my version of the novel that a writer’s always trying to do,” Dippold says. “If someone read the Parks spec from back then, and they read this one, I think the heart of it is the same. Back then, it was more joke-focused. The older version could have felt more like a parody. And as a horror fan, I want the horror and the stakes and the tensions all taken very seriously.”

While that spec script helped Dippold secure a position on the Parks and Recreation writing staff, she never really got the chance to explore some of its specific ideas on that show. Since then, the Widow’s Bay concept has undergone a number of revisions and refinements, some of which were inspired by Dippold’s trip to a Massachusetts diner.

“It wasn’t perfect. It’s just very cozy and lived in,” Dippold recalls. “Big coffee mugs and old locals sitting at the counter in flannels, talking about their days. I didn’t want to leave. I just loved that feeling. We’re trying to capture that feeling: cozy, lived in, but there’s something lurking beneath the surface.”

If that statement also reminds you of Twin Peaks, that’s not a coincidence. That revolutionary David Lynch series has often been cited as one of the show’s biggest stylistic influences, along with the works of Stephen King. As Widow’s Bay star Matthew Rhys explains, the show also draws heavily from Jaws to tell its story of a mayor desperate to keep the tourist dollars coming.

“The big reference we have in the series is Jaws, which was an enormous draw and attraction for me as it is truly one of my favorite films,” Rhys says. “There are a number of horror movies that are nodded towards, referenced, and given a great ode. I’m wary to name them because I don’t want people anticipating them. I would like the viewer to experience, as I did upon reading it, the giggly glee of realizing that you are noticing these wonderful references from our past.”

But from its small-town feel, comedic nature, and emphasis on the lives of those who work in a municipality, it’s indeed difficult to look at Widow’s Bay and not see its Parks and Recreation roots. And while we still know remarkably little about the upcoming show, every part of its cast, premise, and pedigree suggests it could be something special. For now, you can enjoy one of the series’ strange teasers for a taste of what is to come.[end-mark]

The post Apple TV Horror Comedy <i>Widow’s Bay</i> Started as a <i>Parks and Recreation</i> Script appeared first on Reactor.

Books Teen Horror Time Machine

Dreams and Nightmares: Diane Hoh’s The Wish

Why are the teens so obsessed with haunted fortune telling machines??

By Alissa Burger

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Published on April 2, 2026

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As the old saying goes, “be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.” From King Midas’s golden touch and W.W. Jacobs classic horror story “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902) to the ‘80s Tom Hanks comedy classic Big (1988), when wishes are fulfilled they come with a terrifyingly steep price tag—and taking them back is often impossible. This is the situation that several Salem University students find themselves struggling to survive in The Wish (1993), the fourth book in Diane Hoh’s Nightmare Hall series, when they find a vintage fortune telling machine tucked away in the back alcove of the local pizzeria. 

The Wizard is an imposing figure from first glance: “He seemed made of stone, stiff and unmoving inside his red metal booth. His face was long and chiselled, his jaw firm, his painted mouth slightly open. His skin was pale ivory, his beard and moustache snowy-white. He wore a tall, pointed hat and a long flowing gown to match” (1-2). His placard boasts that he can grant your wish or tell your fortune, and most of the Salem University students who come across The Wizard in the back of Vinnie’s pizza place are all for a bit of kitschy fun, with the exception of Alex Edgar, who has a bad feeling about the whole thing and finds that “she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was watching her …” (2). 

Alex is at Vinnie’s with her friends: twin sisters Julie and Jenny, and football players Marty, Gabe, Kyle, and Bennett. They are a close-knit group, though as new freshmen, they’re all still trying to find their fit on campus beyond their immediate friend group, whether that’s Julie and Jenny trying to become more social or Marty, Gabe, and Kyle wishing they were seeing more playing time, while Bennett struggles from being sidelined with an injury. Alex’s friends gather around the fortune telling booth, trying their luck and plugging in their quarters. Alex’s roommate Julie wishes that her face weren’t “so boring” (4) and her friend Gabe wants a car and wishes for “wheels,” saying “I’m so tired of walking, my legs are going to be stumps by the time I graduate” (5). After Julie and Gabe make their wishes and the friends settle in to share a pizza, a violent storm rolls in and a bolt of lightning “came out of nowhere and sped straight across the room to the red metal booth. Those standing closest to it shrieked and flung themselves out of the way, yelping in fear as the arrow of white-hot lightning honed in on The Wizard” (12). Miraculously, no one is hurt and after the storm dies down, Alex and her friends head back toward campus. This is when the first of her friends’ wishes come true in dark and unintended ways, as Julie crashes into a downed tree, an accident that disfigures Julie’s face and badly injures Gabe’s legs. Their wishes come true—Julie’s face definitely isn’t “boring” anymore and Gabe won’t be walking anywhere anytime soon—but in a nightmarish fashion. 

Alex doesn’t make any wishes, though the appearance of The Wizard and her unease about the fortune telling booth bring back a scary childhood memory of her encounter with a similar machine when she was a child, and her grandfather took her to an amusement park to try to distract her from the stress of her parents’ divorce. The fortune teller of Alex’s childhood was female rather than male, but seemed to exert a similar power. As she recalls, “The plaster face was frightening by itself, with its too-pink cheeks and its too-wide grin, but it was the sound that came out of the mouth that terrified Alex […] the grinning mouth uttered a deep, wicked ha-ha-ha, over and over and over again, until Alex’s eardrums felt as if they might shatter from the evil sound” (8, emphasis original). As frightened as she is, however, Alex was transfixed and on that long ago day “she stood there, frozen in a frightened, morbid fascination, unable to turn and run. She had never seen or heard anything so ugly, and she knew, even at nine, that she would see and hear it again many, many times in her nightmares” (8-9, emphasis original). For Alex’s friends, the fortune telling booth is a silly diversion, but for her, it taps into a deep childhood fear, and even though Alex never makes a wish, The Wizard’s power seems to fixate on her. 

After the terrible accident, inexplicable things start happening that seem to blur the lines between supernatural and human. Alex is working a shift in the campus radio station when she gets a creepy phone call, the lights go out, and the door onto the balcony opens, with a powerfully whipping wind that threatens to pull Alex over the edge. This is an understandably terrifying experience for Alex, but when she tries to figure out what happened, no one has any idea what she’s talking about: the student worker who didn’t show up to relieve Alex from her shift no-showed because she got a call saying Alex wanted the extra hours, the door she couldn’t open to save herself was unlocked by the time others arrived, and there weren’t any high winds that anyone else noticed. 

And if potentially supernatural weather attacks weren’t enough, when Alex tries to cut loose and relax at a party being thrown down the hall in her dorm, she looks out the window and sees someone throw her friend Kyle off of the sixth floor balcony of a nearby building. Alex watches in horror as Kyle’s “Arms and legs flailed wildly, grasping outward for something to stop his flight. Alex could feel his mouth opening, could hear, in her mind, his futile screams for help, help, help …” (91, emphasis original). Kyle is badly injured but survives, and while no one can say that what Alex saw didn’t happen (like they imply with the wind at the radio station), they do wonder whether she actually saw what she thinks she saw, suggesting that maybe Kyle fell or jumped, rather than being attacked. Once Alex realizes that whoever pushed Kyle likely saw her through the dorm room window and knows who she is, the danger intensifies, including a terrifying bus ride when Alex boards a shuttle that should be bound for the hospital so she can see her friends—only to find she’s the sole passenger at the mercy of a mysterious driver who wants her dead. 

While Alex is just trying to survive, her friends keep making wishes and dealing with the terrifying consequences. Kiki, a soccer player, wishes she could lose some weight and finds herself wasting away, no matter how much she eats, though the nurses in the university infirmary and the local hospital attribute this to a crash diet or an eating disorder. Marty made a wish that he wouldn’t have to give his speech in his sociology class and when he gets up on the day of his presentation, he finds that he is unable to speak a word, though much like the logical (though incorrect) explanation for Kiki’s sudden, dramatic weight loss, everyone dismisses this as garden variety stage fright. 

The terrible things that have happened to her friends could be chalked up to tragic accidents, logical explanations, or human violence, but Alex remains steadfastly certain that The Wizard is behind it all, and in the end she decides she has no choice but to go back to Vinnie’s and confront him. Despite her fear, she comes face-to-face with this figure and demands “You have to stop, right now. You have to give Marty back his voice and make Kiki well. Do you hear me?” (175, emphasis original). A back-and-forth conversation ensues between the two, with The Wizard responding to Alex through dispensed fortune telling cards, first outraged that “YOU DARE TO THREATEN ME?” (175), before issuing a threat of his own, telling Alex “NO ONE DEFIES ME […] YOU ARE FINISHED” (176). 

The Wizard has just as much power as Alex has feared, but it turns out that he isn’t acting alone. The Wizard has enlisted Bennett as his human agent, capable of exerting his influence in the physical world in ways that are beyond The Wizard, like when Bennett threw Kyle off of the sixth floor balcony. The Wizard made Bennett an offer he couldn’t refuse, offering to heal his injury so he can play football again. As Bennett tells Alex, “I had to do it […] He said it was the only way I could play football again. He said he’d make my knees better if I did what he said […] And he did, Alex. You saw me in that game on Saturday. My knees were fine” (187, emphasis original). Bennett’s identity and popularity are so tied up in his sport that he struggles to see his self-worth or who he could be without it, telling Alex, “I was somebody in high school because of football. I was important. And when I couldn’t play anymore, all of that stopped. I hated that! I couldn’t believe it was all ending so soon. […] then I found out it didn’t have to. I could play again” (188, emphasis original). But Bennett has made a devil’s bargain and what The Wizard gives, he can also take away, which is exactly what happens. Bennett’s recovery is short-lived and in no time at all, his knees are just as bad as before … until he carries out another one of The Wizard’s demands. To save herself and stop the horrors that are plaguing her friends, Alex has to incapacitate Bennett and destroy The Wizard, feats that she accomplishes using one of Bennett’s own crutches as a weapon. 

The nightmare is over, at least for now and at Salem University. But in The Wish’s epilogue, another intrepid restaurant owner stumbles across another fortune telling booth, and the cycle prepares to begin again, with a new wish all that stands between the old fortune teller and untold horror. No one knows what the next group of students will wish for, but one thing is for sure: they’ll be sorry before it’s all said and done.[end-mark]

The post Dreams and Nightmares: Diane Hoh’s <em>The Wish</em> appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Daredevil: Born Again

Daredevil: Born Again Needs to Commit to the Bit in “Shoot the Moon” and “The Scales & the Sword”

If you’re going to give us a room full of cages, GIVE US A ROOM FULL OF CAGES.

By Leah Schnelbach

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Published on April 1, 2026

Credit: Marvel Television / Disney+

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Credit: Marvel Television / Disney+

Daredevil Born Again is back with two episodes this week! “Shoot the Moon” was written by Dario Scardapane and directed by Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson, and “The Scales & the Sword” was written by Heather Bellson and directed by Solvan “Slick” Naim.

And this week… is a mixed bag. Let’s get into it.

A Spoilery Recap

“Shoot the Moon” opens on Cherry being loaded into an ambulance as Daredevil watches from above, pensively fiddling with Bullseye’s “You’re Welcome” knife.

We cut to a glowing stained glass-lit church. A man stands with his back to the altar, and a priest approaches asking if he needs something. First, the man asks for Sister Maggie, but we’re told she’s “on a sabbatical year in Rome”. Then he asks for absolution. And turns, revealing himself to be not Matty but Poindexter. The light in the church turns blue.

Fisk is at a boxing practice with his coach, who I fear is not long for this world. Buck shows up, and the coach tells Fisk he can have a 30 second break. Yeah, no, dude. Buck tells the Mayor about Cherry going to the hospital, Fisk immediately understands that Bullseye was the one who took the AVTF thugs out, and suggests that other thugs should go to the hospital to deal with Cherry.

The coach, who really cannot read a room, attempts to taunt Fisk into coming back to practice by saying “You giving up???” and Fisk replies by punching the man across the room into a wall of mirrors.

Karen is on a call about Cherry while Matt muses on Bullseye not wanting him dead. Karen snaps that Bullseye was the one who killed Foggy, as though Matt might have forgotten that, and then they resolve to go to Astoria to help Ariana. But the AVTF thugs are already arresting Ariana, because Matt and Karen cannot get anywhere in time to help anyone, apparently.

After Buck suggests that they can close in on Daredevil by revealing his secret identity, Fisk personally announces a hunt for Matt Murdock—but with the spin that Murdock is a hero who saved Fisk’s life before going missing, and has been targeted by Bullseye.

So now there are posters of Matt everywhere, and Karen has to usher him back out of Astoria right after they get there so he’s not spotted.

Once again, Fisk has thought a bunch of steps ahead of them.

In rapid succession we get a BB Report of a woman asking what the “Resistance” is actually resisting because “I’ve lived here for 30 years, and New York has never been this great” (once again I see through the obvious bullshit—no one who’s lived in New York that long has a single nice thing to say about this City, unless a non-New Yorker insults it) and another masked Phisk resistance video.

Fisk meets with Powell, who promises “Matt Murdock in this office, and Daredevil’s head on a spike”. Fisk respondes that either of those would be sufficient.

Over at the hospital, the AVTF thugs puff their chests out and insult the patrol cops who are already guarding Cherry’s room, then open the door to find an assemblage of seasoned detectives, including Detective Kim, all just hanging out with Cherry. The thugs tell them to leave, the cops won’t, and then for some reason the thugs back down and leave, after threatening to call for backup. We follow them into an elevator and they talk about the kinds of banalities fascists talk about as a panel opens above them. When the elevator doors open they fall forward with holes in their skulls. The light turns blue, and here’s Bullseye flipping his knives around like a gunslinger.

And then he leaves, the blue fades out, and we’re left with a realistically lit scene of elevator door repeatedly opening and closing on the corpses of a pair of fascists.

Meanwhile, Fisk gently threatening Daniel over the Phisk videos, which of course he’s seen. Then we cut to a scene of Buck and Vanessa going over guns together. Matt and Karen watch the harbor and gently argue about methods of resistance; Fisk and Vanessa discuss how big of an impact they’re required to make, as Important People in the World.

It’s all very choppy.

Then we cut to one of the most complicated scenes in the series so far.

Anela del Toro and her Tia Soledad are walking and talking about Hector Ayala. They duck into a bodega, and of course there are three boys there doing stupid teen shit, in this case swiping a bottle of wine. Soledad tries to call them on it, they sass her, and for plot reasons the bodega owner decides to bust out a whole shotgun and take aim at a child. And then naturally the AVTF thugs show up, knock out the owner, pin the terrified boy to the floor, and when Soledad lightly touches a thug’s arm to try to reason with him, he tells her she’s “assaulting an officer” and grabs her.

Then they’re all being loaded into vans while Angela is pinned to a wall by another thug, and the neighborhood films and yells at them but doesn’t do anything.

Meanwhile Heather and Vanessa are talking about rich lady shit, and Vanessa can somehow sense that Bullseye is watching her.

Kristen McDuffie hears someone in her office and immediately grabs her trusty baseball bat—but it’s Angela, sobbing that her Tia’s been taken. When Kristen realizes that it was AVTF thugs and not regular cops, her face crumples. She gives Angela Hector’s White Tiger suit and talisman, telling her “Soledad didn’t want it.”

Daniel makes dinner for BB, claims he doesn’t know how to cook but he just followed the directions (to which I once again say bullshit) and he repeatedly tries to get her to admit she’s the one making the videos, while she repeatedly tries to get him to admit he’s afraid of Fisk.

Matt, Karen, and Josie are sitting in Josie’s bar drinking and talking about Foggy when there’s a knock at the door, Josie grabs her trusty baseball bat, but it’s Detective Kim, who has come to tell them that Cherry’s safe, and who says “Resist, rebel!” pretty freaking loud as she leaves, which seems like the best possible way to get followed and reveal their secret lair.

We cut to another Phisk video that features Fisk offering the audience red and blue pills. He tells them that all the people the AVTF thugs are arresting have gone to live on a farm upstate with all your childhood dogs, and that “the more you resist, the more you rebel, it hurts my feelings.”

And then the person gets up and turns the camera off, pulls the mask off, and it’s BB under there.

Huh.

Why show us this already? Why kill the mystery???

Vanessa has a way-too-literal dream about Bullseye hunting her, and when she wakes up, her conversation with Fisk about whether they could have another kind of life is intercut with AVTF thugs raiding Josie’s bar. (So did they follow Kim?) Daredevil is able to  suit up and fight them off, but Karen disappears in the melee, and he thinks they took her.

But no!

She was able to fight an AVTF thug, subdue him, and tie him to a chair. They unmask him and interrogate him, and Matt quickly confirms her theory that the man, who is much younger and more scared-looking than most of them, has come to them as a mole to try to help the Resistance. He gives them a key card for the vigilante prison, and Matt explains that he’ll have to punch him and put the hood back on so he’ll be found by other thugs. The kid says “You’ve got to stop Fisk! You’re the only one who—” and Matt knocks him out.

“The Scales and the Sword” opens on Heather Glenn, who has Muse’s mask for some reason. I’m sure it’s fine. She and Kristen have a tense conversation about Matt, his lies, and vigilante-ism as a concept, and man is she ever hanging by a fraying thread.

Kristen finally gets to meet with her client, Duquesne. BUT. In order to do that she has to wear a giant mask, and be escorted (or, really, manhandled through dripping corridors and up and down stairs, in heels) by Powell.

She’s finally led to the holding cell where Duquesne previously met Heather Glenn. He looks good, clean, well-dressed, and pleased to meet her. She confirms that he’s the first “vigilante” to be tried—not by a jury of his peers, of course, but in a tribunal.

“Which means I have no idea how this is gonna go,” Kristen tells him. Which, yes you do, Kristen. Come on.

He tells her that this all started as a standards shakedown, that Fisk wanted him to invest in the Red Hook project and he refused, and they agree that this trial is a convoluted path to “forfeiture of criminal assets”—i.e., Fisk gets to seize all of Duquesne’s money as soon as he’s convicted.

“When do they loot St. Patrick’s now?” he asks.

“I think that’s scheduled for Tuesday,” Kristen replies. The show slowly dials up the Zone of Interest-esque screaming from outside, and we fade through the wall into the room full of caged, terrified prisoners.

Karen’s made an Unhinged Red Thread Conspiracy Wall, which naturally makes Matt compare her to Frank Castle. “Know your enemy, cause they’re all ya got” she says, quoting him. Then, slowly, she asks if Matt thinks Frank is dead, and Matt replies that if Fisk had gotten the Punisher he’d “hang his corpse from the Brooklyn Bridge”. And then of course we get into yet another debate about Frank’s “methods” (you know, straight up murder) and how Matt and Karen can’t do that, even though Karen clearly wants to start killing people, but That Won’t Bring Foggy Back, and What Would Foggy Want, etc.

Buck visits Daniel in his tiny crappy office, and they talk about strategies for that night’s dinner with the Governor and her people. Daniel thinks he can get gossip about her. Buck reminds him that the only thing that matters is finding the person who’s creating the Phisk Blip videos. Daniel also tries to get Buck to admit what sort of super secret government security work he’s done, which is not a thing one of those people would actually admit to. Buck wavers between being slightly threatening and kind of… fatherly? It’s weird.

There’s another Phisk Blip, with Phisk calling Duquesne a “bargain basement Zorro” and ending, as usual, by saying that he loves New York.

The Vigilante Trial comes, and is exactly what you’d expect. There are three judges. One is clearly very unhappy to be involved, popping painkillers and rubbing her temples. The other two are older white men who comment on her discomfort. Heather sits and watches, her eyes getting that anti-vigilante glaze they get. BB sits and watches with the press, and is openly upset in a way that she shouldn’t be if she’s playing double agent. Kristen tries to build a real defense of Duquesne, she’s threatened with Contempt of Court; D.A. Hochberg smirks his way through; Duquesne, an extremely rich and cultured man who’s been held in a chicken wire cage for who knows how long, mutters ironic commentary and doesn’t seem bothered by what’s happening to him.

The only thing is: the trial seems to be being broadcast. We see people watching on their phones and laptops; Fisk watches on a TV in his office, Karen and Matt watch in their lair. Karen seems to have some hope, somehow, and Matt says “hearts and minds win the war”.

When Duquesne is inevitably found guilty, Fisk laughs gleefully, then reins himself in. And… that’s it. It’s one small scene. We don’t really get enough of a sense of how the citizens of New York are responding, we don’t get an idea of this being broadcast nationwide. None of the Avengers or Spider-man show up to this trial that effectively makes them illegal in the City most of them call home.

Later at the dinner, Vanessa—who is weirdly obsessed with Heather Glenn’s love life—seats her next to Buck. Heather doesn’t seem terribly into it, but the two try to banter, as Buck gazes around the room and maps the Fisks, the governor, Daniel, and Sheila onto the members of a royal court. When Heather asks who Buck is, he replies, “I’m the knight”—and amends that to Man-at-Arms when she challenges him.

Meanwhile across the room, the Governor sees that Fisk is about to make a toast and leaps to her feet to do it instead.

Yeah, that’ll bring him back in line.

Kristen’s trying to drink her sorrows away (in a bar down the street from me, I think) when someone buys her a drink. She turns to toast the man just in time for Karen to knock into her, spill the drink, and look down to find a napkin that says YOUR OFFICE NOW in fairly frantic handwriting.

Obviously she bolts right over.

But now I have to ask—does this lifelong New Yorker ever lock her office door? Like what’s going on here?

Daredevil lurks in the shadows, looking and sounding exactly like her former partner Matt Murdock. She insists she doesn’t want to get tangled up with him and the resistance, but, as he points out, she already is.

(Come on. Trying to do a real defense of Duquesne has made you Fisk’s enemy, Kristen. You’re fucked. Don’t be naive.)

He asks her to walk him through her experience in the prison. She says she can’t tell him much because they made her wear a mask, but he insists that won’t be a problem.

(YOU KNOW WHO ELSE THAT WOULDN’T BE A PROBLEM FOR, KRISTEN? YOUR FORMER PARTNER, THE BLIND LAWYER MATT MURDOCK.)

And here’s where my real beef with the episode comes in, because as she recounts the details she remembers (we see flashbacks to her earlier scenes—a breeze here, some roosting pigeons there) it intercuts to show us Daredevil working his way inside. So, the show telegraphed that it was going to give us a big break-in scene, a la the prison escape from Season 3 of the Netflix series, and then it just… tweets it out. Suddenly Daredevil is just breaking in with almost no resistance given what this place is.

Once inside, he hears the ticking watch he left in the munitions box—but then he also hears the screams of the captives, in the opposite direction.

Again, with wayyyyy too little resistance he ends up in the Cage Room. He breaks open the cages and the traumatized screaming people immediately start opening their fellow prisoners cages. Some guards come—nowhere near enough, and luckily it takes several minutes for THE ONES WHO ACTUALLY HAVE GUNS to arrive—and he and a newly-freed Swordsman fight them off. We see the bodega owner among the prisoners, but the whole scene is blurry and too rushed to get a sense of who anyone is—but Frank Castle isn’t among them. They get out, which seems to be a matter of running through a few corridors.

We cut to Karen in the car. She and Matt weren’t expecting a room full of caged people, some of them are gonna have to sit in laps if they’re all going to fit for the ride home. Of course, as soon as Karen hears anything suspicious, she hops right out of her easiest method of escape and walks away from it cursing.

She sees someone, whips her gun out, and it’s poor traumatizes Angela del Toro, wearing her Tio’s talisman and carrying a bag full of guns and walkie-talkies she swiped… somehow.

Karen’s able to use the walkie-talkie to contact Matt, and then Angela hotwires an AVTF wagon so they’ll be able to get everyone out of there. (I think? This part happens offscreen.)

Once again they’re able to herd everyone into the van even as reinforcements arrive, because there are nowhere near enough reinforcements, and they barely shoot at them. Are they letting them escape??? Karen whips her gun out again and shoots at least one of them, which cause Matt to jerk to a stop for second, which he shouldn’t do, and Angela finds her Tia and they hug instead of getting in the fucking van, GET IN THE VAN. Karen tells Swordsman to drive the truck without finding out if anyone else can, presumably because he’s the character we know.

They all escape, and Powell calls Fisk to give him the news. Fisk doesn’t seem that upset, and says Powell “knows what to do” about the crew on The Northern Star, and the episode ends on Karen and Matt reacting to the ship exploding as they speed away from the East River. So clearly Fisk is going to blame the ship explosion on the newly escaped prisoners, and double down on them being terrorists just as they’re being returned to their families.

Grace

Not as much here this week, I fear! I thought Bullseye’s attack on the AVTF at the hospital, paired with him showing up at a church, was super fun. I love how the blue lights glow around him because that’s clearly what’s happening in his own mind, where he’s a superhero, only to fade out as he leaves the room. That elevator attack was maybe the only moment in these two episodes where I felt like the show was becoming the best version of itself. the doors opening and closing on the AVTF thug corpses was objectively hilarious, but once again I wish we’d stayed in the moment longer, and dealt with the aftermath more.

Karen and Matt’s interrogation of the AVTF kid was pretty good! Their attempt at forming a real resistance felt lived in, AND it allowed their old sparkiness to come through.

The AVTF attack on the bodega was good… kind of. I’ll get into it more below.

And I thought the futility of Duquesne’s trial was good, though way too rushed. That trial should have been an entire episode, and the infiltration of the prison site needed to be its own episode.

Retribution

OK. Every time I start to feel confident about this show it undoes me.

The tension between Karen’s desire for violence and Matt’s insistence on non-lethal force is trotted out yet again. Like, we KNOW Karen’s killed people, we KNOW she has a thing for Frank. We really don’t need yet another conversation about this while Matt takes his shirt off so his cross can glint in the light.

They clearly telegraph that Matt would have to fight his way out of the vigilante holding pen by showing us Kristen walking down with the mask on. Cool, but then they cram that whole sequence into less than ten minutes, with Matt’s descent into the prison intercut with his conversation with Kristen? He gets in like it’s nothing, frees a bunch of people, then he and Swordsman are able to fight the guards off with no problem. The scene, which really should have been an entire centerpiece episode, is given no room to breathe, no room to tell its story through the fighting, or to show Matt and Duquesne figuring out how to work together on the fly. Obviously, I am a BIG FAN of seeing AVTF thugs gets hit in the face with things, but it needs to add to the story!

Also, where is Ariana during the bulk of the prison break? The show makes a whole scene of her getting arrested, but she’s seemingly not in the room with the cages, and only suddenly appears as they’re hopping into the AVTF van.

Angela del Toro has had no training, and is clearly in over her head.

I think my second biggest issue, three episodes in, is that our Daredevil show doesn’t have enough Daredevil in it. The writers are so busy checking in with the Fisks, with Daniel and BB, with Bullseye, with Heather Glenn, with randos commenting on how New York is better than ever, that Daredevil feels like just one of the ensemble rather than the star of the show.

I’ll get to my biggest issue in the Closing Arguments section below.

Fiorello’s Desk

Everyone seems to just accept that these Vigilante Trials are political hit jobs by Fisk. The Governor makes a bunch of noises but does nothing. No one above them steps in. None of the billions of superheroes we’ve been introduced to over the course of the MCU shows up outside the courthouse.

Daniel makes dinner for BB to try to get her to come clean about being the person behind the Phisk blips, and then Buck shows up in Daniel’s tiny dingy office to try to convince him to ferret the person out. Guys! There are only so many people it can be! Come on!

I love Lili Taylor, but the Governor is given very little to do other than make a toast. This show needs more Mr. Charles, and it needs it fast.

Quotes!

“Do you feel the need to protect anyone in this office?”

“Yes! You!”

“Good answer.”

—Fisk and Daniel have one of their touching heart-to-hearts

“How many worlds do you need to conquer?”

“How many are there?”

—Fisk and Vanessa have one of their touching heart-to-hearts

Closing Arguments

I’ll start by saying that I appreciate what the show is trying to do. It’s set up a plot that is kind of doing an even darker version of what the third Netflix season did: Fisk is incredibly powerful, utterly corrupt, and backed by a lot of people who either don’t know or don’t care how amoral he is. It’s up to Matt and a tiny scrappy group of people to fight back against impossible odds.

And that’s great, BUT.

If you’re going to do a show about a resistance movement in 2026 you have to show me the wounds. We stay in that bodega attack scene for way too long, mostly in a close-up on Angela’s screaming face. Not on the kids and bystanders who are getting beaten into the concrete. Not on Soledad’s hair getting ripped out of her scalp. Now on the Bodega Guy’s blood pouring out of his ear where he got hit. Not even on the AVTF thug mocking Angela as he ruins her life, daring her to try anything so he can take her too, putting a gun in her face.

The things that would actually happen.

Instead the show stays in the much more aesthetic trauma porn of Angela crying.

Go home with her, TV show. Follow the teenage girl home to her empty, dark apartment. Sit with her terror and despair for a while.

If you’re going to do this, fucking do it.

The show gives us a room full of literal chickenwire cages. Each cage holds a screaming, traumatized person. Where are the buckets of piss and shit? Where are the blankets so encrusted with filth after months that they don’t fold anymore? Where are the stained clothes, the open wounds, the bruises, the sores? Daredevil, a man with extremely heightened senses, walks into that room and doesn’t react to the smell? He frees everyone and they’re all able to not just walk, but RUN after sleeping on concrete floors in cages for months? Duquesne looks perfectly crisp and chipper in his meetings with Heather and Kristen? He shows up to court looking like he’s fresh from a nice hotel room?

For that matter, how are Matt and Karen holding up so well, given that they’re living in a hidden room behind a Hell’s Kitchen dive bar? How are they buying food? Where are they showering?

You’re also telling me that Frank Castle broke out of his cage, somehow navigated through that whole building successfully, didn’t free anyone else, and also all the remaining people were just… left there. There was no punishment, no reprisals, no tightening of security.

If you’re going to do this, fucking do it. I kept thinking about Steve McQueen’s brilliant film Hunger, about the 1981 dirty protest, and eventual hunger strike, in the Maze Prison. That movie showed a couple different kinds of resistance, some violent, some non-violent, but it was very careful to show the cost to everyone. Not just the prisoners, but also the guards, the guards’ families, the prisoners’ families. And it did that by showing the physical cost, showing the filth and the shit and the gauntlet and the bruises that never heal and the seeping wounds—not in a gratuitous way, but because that was the reality of the situation. Knowing that gives you a better understanding of what resistance actually fucking costs people.

OK, I’ll stop, I’ll stop. This week’s two episodes left me with a lot of unsettled thoughts, and I’m eager to hear what everyone else thinks.[end-mark]

The post <em>Daredevil: Born Again</em> Needs to Commit to the Bit in “Shoot the Moon” and “The Scales & the Sword” appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Buffy the Vampire Slayer

On Buffy, “Helpless,” and Feeling Helpless

A single episode saw a powerless Buffy feeling betrayed — which feels pretty familiar to fans right now.

By Nathan Tavares

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Published on April 2, 2026

Image: 20th Century Studios

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Image: 20th Century Studios

Buffy is not weak. Nearly twenty-five years after the end of the cult seven-season 144-episode show starring Sarah Michelle Gellar—itself spun off from a quirky 1992 movie starring Kristy Swanson—certain moments that embody the physical and emotional strength of the ass-kicking vampire slayer are still burned into the collective consciousness of pop culture. Buffy, tearful and running a sword through the man she loves to prevent a demon from devouring the world; leaping off scaffolding into a dimensional rift, sacrificing herself to save both save the world and her sister; looking up from her rocket launcher after wasting a demon, steely-eyed, her hair perfect, her lips glossed. Everyone who comes toe-to-toe with Buffy—demon, vampire, school principal, gross frat boy—underestimates her. Because look at her, they sneer. This small scrap of a dumb blonde girl can’t possibly think she’s strong enough to stop whatever evil they’re plotting.  

Which is why it was so empowering for the show’s legion of misfit fans—especially the girls, gays, and theys who saw themselves as an outcast like her—to see her summarily kick the ass of everyone who underestimated her. And usually toss off a quip and look amazing at the same time. 

Because if Buffy wasn’t helpless, neither were we. 

Except when she really was, like in the twelfth episode of season three, “Helpless,” written by David Fury, which first aired on January 19, 1999. The single episode in the entire series when Buffy loses her Slayer powers after she is drugged by her Watcher, Giles, at the behest of the male-led Watchers Council. We see Buffy weak and doubtful. At the mercy of petty tyrants, bruised by an entitled douchebag jock who’s assaulting one of her friends, and abandoned by her father figures. We see her running from vampires she would’ve dusted without breaking a sweat, and screaming for help.  

Fitting, then, to take a look back at the episode in the wake of the recent axing of the Buffy: New Sunnydale revival by streamer Hulu. It’s a move that feels like a stake to the heart, especially given the show’s creative team: Oscar-winning filmmaker Chloé Zhao (who also directed the 2021 Marvel flick Eternals, which sees a found family of superheroes fighting against the structure of power they were once a part of) as director and producer; Nora Zuckerman and Lilla Zuckerman (the minds behind the excellent Power Face) as writers, executive producers, and showrunners. And of course, Gellar, who announced the project on Instagram in February 2025, “I promise you, we will only make this show if we know we can do it right. And I will tell you that we are on the path there.” Notably absent from the revival was Buffy’s original creator. In the years since the series ended, numerous reports surfaced about his abusive, toxic behavior on the set of Buffy and other projects. Which left fans stunned and conflicted about a show they loved so much. The revival seemed like a promise that Buffy was powerful enough to continue without him. 

In the face of a million money-grabbing franchise resurrections, Gellar’s hesitance to revisit Buffy for years was heartening. Like a flash to the season five episode, “Forever,” which sees Buffy’s sister Dawn (played with such heart by the late Michelle Trachtenberg) casting a resurrection spell to bring back their dead mother. “Tara told me that these spells go bad all the time,” Buffy says. “People come back… wrong.” Gellar knew some zombified version of the show would be wrong. But here, finally, was the chance to do it right. 

“Helpless” was chilling to watch during its initial airing, and even more so after the late-show reveals about the origins of the Slayer line. It’s one of the best episodes that really questions the central conceit of Buffy’s premise: “In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer.” 

Sure, but, Chosen by who?

The episode opens with Buffy and Angel—her on-again, off-again boyfriend (and sometimes soulless nemesis)—sparring and working up sexual tension. Before, bummer! Buffy has to head to the library for a training session with Giles, her Watcher. Buffy lets on that it’s her birthday that coming weekend, and she’s excited because she and her almost-entirely-absent father enjoy a yearly tradition of seeing an ice skating show together on her birthday. “I could use a little fun,” she says. (And, girl, we hear that). Fun will have to wait, though: Giles (her true protector and surrogate father throughout the series) has Buffy cooped up in the Sunnydale High School library and is waving crystals in her face, because “studying vibratory stones” is part of her training, he says. He places a large blue stone in front of a totally bored Buffy, before the scene shifts to the Slayer on patrol duty. It’s a patrol like any other, with her walloping a vampire and quipping at the same time, until Buffy looks dazed and dizzy. The vamp throws her to the ground, and nearly shoves her own stake through her chest, but a rattled Buffy manages to best him.  

The next morning we see her at the school library, whipping knives at a target, when Giles walks in. She keeps missing the mark, and the knives uselessly flop to the ground. She’s way off her game, she worries. Giles assures/dismisses her: “perhaps you got a bad flu bug or something.” No! She can’t be sick, she stammers, because her dad is coming for her birthday and canceling will break his heart.

Well, turns out she won’t break it that much. Once Buffy gets home, her mom Joyce informs them that her father isn’t coming for Buffy’s birthday after all, since he can’t take the time away from work. He sent flowers, and ice show tickets, though. Plus a letter, which Buffy crumples in her hands. That’s fine, she brushes off her mom’s concern. She wanted a quiet birthday, anyway. Well, looks like she’s not getting that either, thanks to the next scene—a staple in the series—which sees ominous, unnamed men skulking in the shadows of an abandoned boarding house, seemingly plotting to take down our plucky Slayer. The men stare at a big ominous box, with the leader of the pack telling them, “We’re getting very close. The Slayer’s preparation is nearly complete.” 

Said Slayer is more bummed about her missed ice show, though, working with Giles in the library that evening for more vibratory crystal and glib commentary training. She hints that maybe Giles could take her, if he’s free? No-fun Giles asks her to focus. And focus, she does, on that big blue crystal again… until Buffy zones out, in a trance, and Giles jabs an unresponsive Buffy in the arm with a whopper of a hypodermic needle that’s filled with yellow liquid. Then he sends her off on her way, as he stares pensively at the ground. 

Throughout the next act, we see Buffy unraveling. We see her swooping in to save Cordelia from being assaulted by a jock asshole who’s calling her a tease, and the guy easily knocking Buffy to the ground. We see her walking past gross guys who sexually harass her on the street and ignoring them when she would’ve at least figuratively torn them new assholes without fearing that they could overpower her. We see her running from vampires she would’ve easily dusted days ago, and trying to wave down cars for help. We see a visibly bruised Buffy panicking at Giles, and him brushing her off, again and again. She’ll be fine, he tells her. It’s nothing. It’s a flu. She should take it easy, and this will pass in a few days. 

Until we learn the truth. That yellow liquid Giles injected Buffy with? A cocktail of muscle relaxers and adrenal suppressors meant to sap Buffy’s strengthen and skills. All part of something called the “Cruciamentum”—a test of the Slayer’s ability on her eighteenth birthday that sees her depowered and locked up with a vampire, with only her wits to save her. “Cruciamentum” means “torture” or “pain” in Latin, so you can guess how this particular flavor of standardized testing is going to go down with our girl.

The leader of the nameless skulking, suited men we saw in the abandoned boarding house earlier in the episode? Quentin Travers (played by Harris Yulin), the head of the Watchers Council—a group of mostly men who, thus far in the series, have been portrayed as bookish researchers here to guide the Slayer and hoard knowledge about the supernatural world. Travers is here to oversee the trial, which Giles formally protests, thank you muchly, calling it “an antiquated exercise in cruelty.” He’s still been hypnotizing and injecting Buffy, presumably for days, though.

“It’s a time-honored rite of passage,” Travers says. Yulin, as Travers, absolutely nails the bored disdain of a man who professes to want to help women, then does the opposite (a trait seen today in politicians and podcast bros the world over). Surely, that rite of passage is less time-honored by the actual Slayers being tortur—excuse me—cruciamentum’ed. 

The episode comes to a head when Giles rescues Buffy in the street from being torn apart by vampires, and tells her about the Cruciamentum. And by the way, the vampire that powerless Buffy is going to be locked in a room with? A particularly nasty flavor of misogynistic monster named Kralik, who tortured and killed more than a dozen women when he was still human. He’s trapped in that big box the Watchers are fussing over, and they’ve totally got this all under control. So, yeah. A quiet weekend at the ice show sounds a lot more fun.

Buffy, though, is stuck on the whole “Giles hypnotized and drugged you” thing. “You bastard!” she yells at him. “All this time you saw what it was doing to me. All this time and you didn’t say a word!” Then later, as Giles tries to spin excuses about protocol and duty, she’s barely keeping it together when she asks, crumbling, “Who are you? How could you do this to me?” 

The rest of the episode fits all the familiar beats of a monster-of-the-week classic. Giles says that since he told Buffy about the Cruciamentum, the trial won’t go forward. He tells her to lay low until her strength comes back in a few days. Except, whoopsies, Kralik escapes his confinement, kidnaps Buffy’s mother, and lures Buffy to the abandoned boarding house. Of course Buffy is going to save her, even without her powers. Buffy outwits Kralik, then gets meta while he’s kicking the bucket. “If I had the Slayer’s power, I’d be punning right about now,” she cracks. Giles is fired from the Watchers Council, and Buffy is on the outs with them, which is an ongoing thread throughout the next few seasons. 

But that library scene, man. A stake through the heart, right up there with bits from lauded episodes like “The Body” and “Hush.” Giles betrayed her, the one who’s been her true father throughout the show, comforting her when her boyfriend lost his soul, reminding Buffy again and again of who she is when doubt creeps in, even if they playfully butt heads. “Helpless” takes the lie that power structures are in place to protect you, holds it up to the sunlight, and watches it turn to dust. Your Watcher will betray you when you need him because the Watchers with their centuries of knowledge and secrets have always decided how much the Slayer should know and when to help her, as long as she’s useful to them. They’re waging a war against the darkness, and she’s the weapon. This is how it’s always been. And what if the whole Cruciamentum is just an excuse to kill a willful Slayer so the Council can just replace her with one they can control? 

It takes the core of the show—a powerful woman—and sinks its fangs in. She has power, but maybe it’s something flimsy that can be taken away. Who gave it to her? Where did it come from? How was she Chosen? Who watches the Watchers Council, anyway? 

The questions follow the show like the lingering effects of a spell until the final season, when Buffy learns the origins of her powers and the Slayer line. To defeat the First Evil, an all-powerful entity beyond time that seeks to end the Slayer line by killing all Potential Slayers, Buffy travels through a spiritual portal where a group of Shadowmen offer her more power to kill the First Evil in the same way that they created the first Slayer: by chaining her to the rocks and “infusing” her with the heart and spirit of a demon in a clear visual metaphor for sexual assault. Buffy refuses, telling the Shadowmen, “You violated that girl, made her kill for you because you’re weak, you’re pathetic, and you obviously have nothing to show me.” 

Buffy’s not weak, even without the tainted power offered by the Shadowmen, who later became the Watchers Council. Because of course. “She alone is the Slayer” is another time-honored rite, same as the Cruciamentum, and Buffy is going to break those chains. The show ends with Buffy and the gang magically activating the latent Slayer power within every Potential Slayer in the world—all of them railing back against the armies of darkness. And nearly 25 years later, the scene still ripples goosebumps over my arms. Women and girls all over the world gasping as strength and power courses through them. One woman blocks the fist of a man about to strike her, and she stands, finally knowing she has the strength to break free. And with Buffy at the lead, the army of Slayers beats back the army of darkness. 

Chosen, all of them. Suddenly, not so helpless.

The promise of the Buffy revival was so beautiful, because of its potential. Imagine how the creative team could have continued a story that was about, in its long arc, a woman and her friends freeing themselves from a system of male control by reclaiming and sharing power. (And, fingers crossed, the revival would’ve ignored everything about the messy comics continuation and its puzzling character choices,). How cool it would’ve been to see an adult Buffy mentoring a new Slayer and teaching her how to be strong, instead of controlling her like a Watcher. Think of the new hells of modern adolescence that the show could have explored: School demon attack drills, and town administrators who wave their hands and say, “that’s just how things have always been done here”; a cursed social network (wait, this is fiction, right?); oligarchs bulldozing a park to build a datacenter that’s actually a temple to a banished dark god (if anywhere, the Guardian stuff would be here). Who knows if any subject matter like that would have featured in the revival, but it’s thrilling to imagine what Zhao and others who understood the power of the original would have dreamed up. 

I have no desire to read the pilot’s leaked script (just like I don’t want anyone to read my pre-publication book manuscripts, either). Ditto for deep-diving into blame-shifty stories that various outlets have released, based on dishy leaks from “sources close to production.” The director was wrong! The writing was wrong! The rival was too “non-mainstream!” Like, imagine a less mainstream idea than a television show about a teenaged girl fighting vampires that was ordered as a mid-season replacement on a new network that no one had heard of, that even the stars thought would not last more than a few episodes. Gellar has also since stated, “I know I’ve seen a version of the [New Sunnydale] script out there, it’s not actually correct. That stuff is really unfortunate. And I ask fans if you see scripts, if you see [the pilot] leaked, don’t watch it because you’re not getting our visions and all of that.”     

Even after rewrites aimed at addressing Hulu’s concerns, it seems, the series was still slayed. Puzzling, too, is the timing. If the script and the pilot were so apocalyptically bad, surely something would’ve beeped well beforehand—at least before Hulu spent millions on the pilot. Gellar later told People, “We had an executive on our show who was not only not a fan of the original but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series and how it wasn’t for him. … So that tells you the uphill battle that we had been fighting since day one, when your executive is literally proud to tell you that he didn’t watch it.” Worth mentioning, too, is the particular Cruciamentum-y March 14 timing of when executives alerted the New Sunnydale team of the cancellation. Gellar was about to hit the stage to promote her role in the horror-comedy flick Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which was produced by Searchlight Pictures. Which, like Hulu, is owned by Disney. She was basically on the clock for the company that killed her show. Zhao was a day away from attending the Oscars, where her film Hamnet was nominated for eight Academy Awards. A day later, an animated reboot of Firefly, was announced. And—hey—that production has the blessing of the man who created both Firefly and Buffy. Cue Watcher Travers: It’s been done this way for a dozen centuries.

A funny thing about Buffy during its initial airing was that shows about superheroes or magic or fantasy didn’t have the same cultural weight as they do now. Kids could like a fantasy show about teenagers, sure, but adults and critics? They had to couch Buffy in metaphor. Buffy wasn’t really about slaying demons, it was about the horrors of adolescence, packed with Shakespeare allusions, and grad-school-level feminist critical theory! So here’s a metaphor: A male executive of a global conglomerate wanting to keep Buffy in the dark is like the various Big Bads of the show. It’s the Master. It’s the Mayor, the Preacher, the First. It’s Quentin Travers and the Watchers Council—or, Non-Watchers Council, as it were—swooping in and deciding to de-power a Slayer just because they feel like it.  

Basically, it’s just so fucking boring. 

I can imagine a de-fanged revival that Hulu would have been unafraid to air. That came back wrong because it was a shambling corpse of a Buffy-shaped thing. That said nothing other than we want to cash in on nostalgia. I’m glad that something that Zhao, the Zuckermans, and Gellar didn’t support never made it to air. But still, how boring. Boring for a man to decide to pull the plug on the show that, at its heart, has always been about challenging power. That centers on historically excluded communities sharing power. But, well, Hulu is owned by Disney, who in turn is owned by investors—including BlackRock, the Vanguard Group, State Street—with various apocalyptic handholds on global resources, wealth, and information with little oversight. Media companies are cow-towing to an American administration that is trying to control who gets to tell stories, what kind of stories are told, and what kinds of people are showcased in these stories—among a host of other Big-Bad-level daily inhumanities and environmental disasters. That administration is spreading AI-altered misinformation, and lying about lethal violence against American citizens even in the face of video evidence and witness testimony. Plus, they sure seem to have a special Watchers Council-y disdain for women, as they seek to pass laws to make it harder for married women to vote, after already decimating resources for women’s healthcare both in America and abroad.   

Inherent in the concept of the Buffy revival was a kernel of bright hope, somehow: We see this. The time is right for Buffy to slay the demons because you need her right now. Look at the world.

Is this a stretch? I don’t know. Much like a teenaged girl facing down a demon, I’m seemingly wildly outclassed. I’m a middle-aged gay dude at his computer screaming into the widening maw of a Hellmouth that is 2026. Some days, things feel a little too end-times-y, and I just want to escape into a fantasy world that helps me not feel so helpless. 

Helpless. 

In “Helpless,” when Giles tells Buffy about the Cruciamentum he tries to comfort her with, “You’ll be yourself again in a few days.” And there she is in the next episode, putting the brakes on another apocalypse. Because no one is ever going to take power from her again.[end-mark]

The post On Buffy, “Helpless,” and Feeling Helpless appeared first on Reactor.

News Supergirl

Kara Makes Friends (Sorta) and Must Save Krypto in the New Supergirl Trailer

I just think there are other ways to create tension than putting cute animals in danger

By Molly Templeton

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Published on March 31, 2026

Screenshot: DC Studios

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Screenshot: DC Studios

What did we say last time, DC Studios? We said DON’T HURT THE DOG. But of course they didn’t listen.

The latest trailer for director Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl gives a little more sense of what kicks off the plot of this movie—and it’s not pretty. Avert your eyes, dog-lovers: The villainous Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts) takes a shot at Krypto, who then “has three days.” And he’s all Kara (Milly Alcock) has got, you know? We get friendly, people-loving Superman (David Corenswet) on a TV screen to drive this home. She hasn’t found her people. She thinks she doesn’t have any.

But at that point, she hasn’t met Lobo (Jason Momoa) yet. Or Ruthye (Eve Ridley), the kid with whom she’s going to team up with on “an epic, interstellar journey of vengeance and justice.” (She may also be teaming up with Lobo; the synopsis refers to an “unlikely companion,” which could be either. Or both!)

Supergirl used to have the subtitle Woman of Tomorrow, which is the name of the Tom King & Bilquis Evely comic series that inspired the film. It has since lost that subtitle. The basic plot—the team-up with Ruthye, the villain—remains the same; the color palette, though, is notably different from the comic, which might make a person wonder how much else the movie has changed.

The screenplay is by Ana Nogueira, who is working on a whole pile of DC productions. Director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya; Pam & Tommy) remains an odd choice for this project.

Supergirl is in theaters June 26.[end-mark]

The post Kara Makes Friends (Sorta) and Must Save Krypto in the New <i>Supergirl</i> Trailer appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV They Will Kill You

They Will Kill You Is a Gore Fest Running Thin on Substance

If I had a nickel for every time a woman tried to save her sister from wealthy devil-worshippers, etc…

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on March 31, 2026

Image: Warner Bros.

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Image: Warner Bros.

To begin discussing They Will Kill You, there’s an immediate aside that comes up about the fact that two films featuring devil-worshipping wealthy folks who are trying to sacrifice a woman and her sister to appease their dark lord were released within a week of each other, and the plots were so similar that the trailer of one was cut to omit that fact entirely. (The trailer for this one, in fact.) Given the state of things, I’m hardly one to look askance at two similarly decorated cakes and call myself the injured party.

Having said that, the greatest praise I can offer this film is that it is a diverting way to spend 94 minutes. If that’s all you’re looking for (and your tummy is unbothered by excessive, silly gore), go forth and enjoy! Extra cake for you, everybody is a winner.

My first point of disconnect from the experience is a tonal shift that occurs right at the start. The opening of the film features Asia Reeves (Zazie Beetz) and her younger sister trying to escape a sadistic home. It is a dark, tense sequence with nothing remotely fantastical about it, and we get the background of our protagonist in full: Asia shoots their father when he catches up to them, but on hearing the sirens, she runs. She leaves her sister with their abuser still alive, and winds up getting caught anyway. Ten years later, she’s arrived for her new job at The Virgil, a fancy building in New York with a dark secret. If you assume that she’s looking for her little sister, Maria (Myha’la), you’d be head of the class.

The film promptly descends into gonzo violence and absurdity, a world that feels totally disconnected from its first ten minutes: We learn that the building’s residents have a pact with Satan for eternal life, and their goal is to sacrifice Asia to keep that pact. They are immortal, so Asia can’t kill these people—only slow them down. Her sister is a maid in the building, and sometimes “the help” also get to join the pact (though they stay “the help,” of course). So Asia is stuck trying to outwit a bunch of wealthy, unkillable acolytes. There’s no more filling in between the lines; that’s the entirety of the story. What’s more, there’s practically no dialogue from that point on outside of questions about where Asia is, and why they need her to just give up and allow herself to be sacrificed.

It feels as though screenwriter Alex Litvak and co-writer/director Kirill Sokolov had a book full of action sequences they wanted to film and made some sparse choices about the plot as an excuse to knit the whole thing together. Obviously, They Will Kill You has the vaguest echoes of the seminal Get Out and its more direct companion Ready Or Not, but both of those films were explicit commentaries about the institutions they were critiquing. They Will Kill You pretends to try—there are one or two pieces of extremely on-the-nose dialogue to that end—but knows it doesn’t really have to. Asking your audience to root against wealthy death cults isn’t a tall order when the general populace is pretty fed up with the uber-rich pretending that they have society’s best interests at heart. 

Acknowledging that there is a clear racial aspect to this disparity could have been one place where They Will Kill You distinguished itself. The outline of a suggestion is there via The Virgil’s (mostly) POC staff and (mostly) white residents, the elevation of its superintendent (Patricia Arquette’s Lillith Woodhouse) and her husband (Paterson Joseph’s Ray Woodhouse), and the disagreement between Lillith and Ray about continuing to participate in this heinous ritual. But the way the film goes about addressing these issues only raises more questions: Ray tries to help Asia, and when he’s caught, he tells his wife that he used to believe in what they did for Satan because they were “cleaning up the streets” but now they were just murdering unfortunates. So, apparently, Ray thinks that some impoverished people are worth saving and others aren’t? Or that certain types of criminals deserve to die?

That kinda seems like a big deal?

The action sequences are cribbing a lot from giants of the genre in ways that feel frankly self-indulgent. Asia begins her evening at The Virgil sitting up in bed and clutching a lighter with a samurai etched into its casing, every flip of the lid suggesting the cut of a katana and a spray of red. It turns out that Asia also packed a machete, and soon she dispatches her first assailants with Kill Bill-esque gouts of blood. Later on in the film, Maria asks Asia where she learned to fight like that, and Asia glibly replies, “Prison.” You’d assume that meant we were in for a flashback of epic proportions, where we finally get introduced to Asia’s sensei? Ah… nope. That was the whole joke. Also, the samurai-style trappings are quickly dispensed with and never really return.

There are grotesque body horror elements to contend with as well, as the immortal denizens of the building recover from every indignity that Asia visits on them. The only one that really garners the enjoyment it should is Sharon Vanderbilt’s (Heather Graham) plucked eyeball that rolls about trying to find Asia as her head regrows. It’s a lot of fun (even if the “regrowth” aspect doesn’t make much sense) until you notice that the eyeball can apparently hear all by itself? Sans ears? At which point, a really enjoyable bit promptly falls flat. Even noting that, I sort of wish the eyeball had become more of a main character throughout the film’s duration—it was one place where the film’s better tonality comes clear.

The pig head on a stick as the avatar for the Devil is less exciting than they clearly think it is, though. If you’ve seen Peter Jackson’s earlier zombie films or anything Sam Raimi puts out or you went through a Cronenberg phase, this is just more of that thing you’ve already seen done better.

The movie keeps upping the ante for action, and ends in the sort of bloodbath you’d expect, but the machinations stop being interesting long before we reach the summit. There’s also setup for a sequel that feels entirely unearned, though not surprising. It’s a shame because Beetz deserves a better career than the one she’s currently embarked on, and she is dead fun to watch. Someone give her a better action hero than this.[end-mark]

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News Masters of the Universe

He-Man Has the Power and He’s Not Afraid to Use It in New Masters of the Universe Trailer

He gets knocked down, but he gets up again

By Molly Templeton

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Published on March 31, 2026

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

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Image: Amazon MGM Studios

The new Masters of the Universe film remains mystifying on several levels. Why cast Jared Leto in your movie if he’s going to be all CGI and his voice is unrecognizable? (Why cast Jared Leto at all, full stop?) Why does that one ship look like it escaped from a Transformers film? Why does Camilla Mendes, so brazen on Riverdale, constantly just fade into the background as Teela? Why does this trailer seem at least as interested in Man-at-Arms as it is in He-Man?

I guess the answer to that last one is “Because he’s played by Idris Elba,” who is almost inarguably the most famous person visible in said trailer. (As previously noted, Jared Leto is not actually visible.) Masters of the Universe is clearly trying to coast on its brand recognition.

The Sheep Detectives star Nicholas Galitzine plays poor lost Prince Adam, who has been sent to the mundane world for an unspecified period of time. He’s had it up to here with everyone thinking he’s crazy, so he goes to get his special sword and go home to Eternia, where things are not going at all well. Galitzine is clearly game to play a ripped guy in very small clothing, and I applaud his commitment to the bit. If nothing else, you can say that yes, he looks like He-Man, action-figure-turned-cartoon.

Everyone looks just fine; the movie just appears to be a muddle of CGI and very funny outfits for accuracy. The film also stars Alison Brie as Evil-Lyn, Sam C. Wilson as Trap Jaw, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson as Goat Man, Kojo Attah as Tri-Klops, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson as Fisto, and Morena Baccarin as the Sorceress. It is directed by Travis Knight, son of Nike founder Phil Knight, and five men are credited with the screenplay and/or story: Chris Butler, Adam Nee, Dave Callaham, Alex Litvak, and Michael Finch.

Does it have THE POWAH? You can find out when Masters of the Universe arrives in theaters June 5th.[end-mark]

The post He-Man Has the Power and He’s Not Afraid to Use It in New <i>Masters of the Universe</i> Trailer appeared first on Reactor.

News Avatar: The Last Airbender

Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender Season Two Gets a Release Date

The live-action series will continue in June

By Molly Templeton

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Published on March 31, 2026

Image: Netflix

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Image: Netflix

More than two years after the first season, Netflix is finally ready to deliver more Avatar: The Last Airbender. The streamer announced the news today via a cute little behind-the-scenes video (below) that features the stars talking about how the second season is a “level up.”

Netflix also offered a fairly lengthy synopsis for season two:

This season will bring a whole gaggle of new characters:

• Chin Han (Mortal Kombat, Skyscraper) as Long Feng 
• Hoa Xuande (The Sympathizer, Top of the Lake: China Girl) as Professor Zei
• Justin Chien (The Brothers Sun, The Great Leap) as King Kuei
• Amanda Zhou (Spinning Out, The Handmaid’s Tale) as Joo Dee
• Crystal Yu (Doctor Who, Good Omens) as Lady Beifong
• Kelemete Misipeka (Sons of Thunder) as The Boulder
• Lourdes Faberes (The Sandman, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre) as General Sung
• Rekha Sharma (Yellowjackets, Battlestar Galactica) as Amita
• Terry Chen (Lucky Star, Jessica Jones, House of Cards) as Jeong Jeong
• Dolly de Leon (Triangle of Sadness, Between the Temples, Ghostlight) as Lo and Li 
• Lily Gao (Blue Sun Palace, Twisted Metal, Slip) as Ursa
• Madison Hu (The Brothers Sun, The Boogeyman) as Fei
• Dichen Lachman (Severance, Jurassic World: Dominion, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes) as Yangchen

Avatar: The Last Airbender was renewed for seasons two and three at once, and filmed both seasons—so in theory you won’t have that long to wait between them. Season two premieres June 25 on Netflix.[end-mark]

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Books The Wheel of Time

Reading The Wheel of Time: Verin and Tuon Deal with Ta’veren Nonsense inThe Gathering Storm (Part 21)

Mat is very excited to share his character sheets with his friends.

By Sylas K Barrett

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Published on March 31, 2026

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Welcome once and again to Reading The Wheel of Time, in which I spend a lot of time wondering how, exactly, ta’veren powers work. Every time they come up I theorize, and now I have the added questions of whether what Sanderson is doing with them matches exactly with what Jordan intended. I don’t have definitive answers to any of my questions, but boy, is it interesting to theorize.

It’s also interesting to theorize what Verin is really up to, and how Tuon is going to adapt to the world as she learns more about it, and as she takes on the mantle—and responsibilities—of the Seanchan Empress. (May she live a reasonably long time and learn that slavery is bad.)

And now, on to the recap.

In his tent, Mat has gathered Talmanes, Thom, Noal, Juilin and Mandevwin to go over his plan for the encounter with the strange woman who has been passing out pictures of him. Not only has he figured out where to station both cavalry and crossbowmen to cover any need for reinforcements or coverage for retreat, he has also created characters with elaborate backstories for some of them, including making Mandevwin Thom’s apprentice and Talmanes a passing Warder. Mandevwin is confused by his backstory while Talmanes is amused, and not even bothering to hide it. Mat notes that he was wrong to ever consider Talmanes to be lacking in a sense of humor.

Mat explains that he may have gone a little overboard; the woman can produce a perfect picture of him and he is determined to find out what is going on before he’s descended upon by Darkfriends from every side.

He goes out to inspect the camp, making his way to Aludra’s tents where he is stopped by Bayle Domon until Aludra gives permission for Mat to enter. Mat is irked at having to do this in his own camp, but he doesn’t want to argue with or disrespect Aludra. She is clearly hurt that he went and married Tuon.

Mat finds Aludra working on nightflowers; Egeanin, who is still insisting on being called Leilwin, is helping her. Aludra has laid out her plans for the dragons, including figures for how much material would be needed and estimations about the cost. Mat is flabbergasted by the numbers.

Aludra also wants every bellfounder available to work on the dragons and reminds Mat that both ironworkers and materials will soon be turned to the manufacture of weapons anyway. Mat hopes Rand has the resources and money to do all this, as he himself does not. When he complains, Aludra tells him that rudeness is not like him, although pessimism is a fond friend.

Mat insists on taking the plans for the dragons to his own tent to keep them safe, and Aludra agrees. She asks when the Dragons will be needed; Mat doesn’t know the answer, but he is confident it will be soon. Aludra assures him that the dragons will each be worth a hundred swords in battle.

As Mat is leaving, Olver comes running up with a message from Talmanes that someone has come to the camp to see Mat, and that she has pictures of Mat as well as “a distinctive face.” Mat hurries to the front of the camp to find Verin waiting for him. Mat realizes that it is Verin who has been distributing pictures of him and offering gold for news of his whereabouts. She tells Mat that she learned of his location from the merchant Mat paid to draw the map of Trustair, and that she thought she should come find Mat before he charged into the town with soldiers.

Verin explains that she has been forced to wait for him because of his ta’veren powers. Mat also learns that Verin knows Traveling, and the opportunity to be in Caemlyn that day offers staggering possibilities. But first, Verin wants to talk.

As Rand arrives outside of Falme via gateway, he’s surprised by all the memories that the sights and sounds of the seaside city bring back to him. He thinks of how he has changed, and how his transformation in Falme was as profound as the one he experienced in the Aiel Waste.

Nynaeve rides up beside him as Rand and his procession make their way towards Falme. Rand reflects on how she has started adapting the habits and dress of places she visits to her own personal sense of what is proper. Once, he would have found this amusing.

Nynaeve is also reminded of the last time they were in Falme, and the two discuss the memories. Rand surprises himself by telling Nynaeve about killing Turak, something he has never talked about with anyone. Nynaeve remarks that this means that Rand does have a right to carry a heron-marked blade after all, but Rand disagrees with the statement that he is a blademaster, since there was no one to witness the fight. She suggests this does not matter, but he points out that the entire point of the heron-mark is to be seen.

Rand has only brought a handful of channelers with him; Nynaeve, three Wise Ones, Corele, Narishma, and Flinn, hoping the token guard will convince the Daughter of the Nine Moons of his sincere desire for peace. But he knows something could go wrong, so he seizes saidin through the access key, filling himself with enough of the One Power to stand against a hundred damane, perhaps two hundred. Holding this much of saidin will also make him difficult to shield.

Nynaeve notices the sickness that he always experiences when he touches saidin, as well as the glow from the sphere on the access key. Rand assures her that he is “only holding a little extra, as a precaution.”

When he sees the Daughter of the Nine Moons, he is surprised by how small and young she is. He dismounts and steps forward, to the seat that has been set for him, opposite hers.

Tuon is initially surprised at the Dragon Reborn’s youth, but reminds herself that conquering heroes are often young, as Artur Hawkwing was himself when he began uniting the lands. She studies him carefully, deducing his character by the way he dresses and carries himself. She is unsettled by the presence of a marath’damane and two male channelers accompanying the Dragon. She knows she is exposed, despite her Deathwatch guards, Selucia, and the damane at her command.

There is some consternation among Tuon’s followers when al’Thor states that they will make peace today, almost as if giving her an order. The Dragon also displays a keen eye when he recognizes Selucia as Tuon’s bodyguard.

He invokes the prophecies to point out the danger of their division, of the Seanchan coming to disrupt his control over the lands when the Last Battle is looming. Tuon, reflecting to herself that the people of these lands have forgotten much of the prophecies, tells him that the Return came, following the omens, expecting to find a united land that praised them and accepted their leadership into the Last Battle. She tells him that it gives them no pleasure to fight, just as it gives a parent no pleasure to discipline an unruly child.

Reflecting that al’Thor could kill her if he wanted to, Tuon counters that, if the Last Battle is so close, perhaps he should unite his lands behind the Seanchan banner and have his people take the oath. He cuts her off before she can add that all marath’damane should be leashed. She tries to convince him that the a’dam is the only way to deal with channelers, but he will not let it happen, and tells her point blank that he will not concede the point.

Realizing she has lost control over the conversation, she brings up Mat, surprising both al’Thor and the marath’damane with him. When she remarks that she found him to be an indolent scoundrel, both of them defend Mat intensely, surprising Tuon with the level of their loyalty.

Finally, al’Thor tells her that neither their differences nor what they have in common matters, and that only his need for her matters. He tells her that she must sign a treaty with him, that this is not a request but his will; Tuon suddenly finds herself longing to obey and please him. Many reasons that the treaty is a good idea present themselves to her, and when she tries to remember why the treaty is a bad idea, those thoughts slip away. She doesn’t understand what is happening to her, why her chest feels constricted, or why she sees a dark halo around him. Agreement is on her tongue, but somehow she manages to whisper a no.

Her confidence grows as she repeats the denial, telling him that he will bow before her, not the other way around.

The Dragon is silent a moment, and then, clearly infuriated, stalks away, followed by his retinue. Tuon is left speechless for a long, long time, but when she eventually recovers herself she turns to her own followers and utters the words “I am the Empress.”

Though there will be a formal coronation and celebrations to follow, this is all Tuon needs to do to officially be the Empress, and everyone falls prostrate before her. Reflecting that the world needs her, needs an Empress, Tuon begins to give orders for an attack on the White Tower. They need to strike at the Dragon Reborn quickly, and stop him from gaining any more power.

Not me wondering if Matrim Cauthon is a former theater kid.

I was actively smiling as I read about Mat’s extensive plans that include pages of backstory for each of his “characters.” The section was really well-written, with the slow reveal that Mat’s response to Mandevwin’s questions wasn’t an off-the-cuff attempt to soothe the captain’s objections, but rather an unhinged backstory he had already come up with, and written down. It was very funny, and I found myself actively smiling as I read it—especially when he tells Mandevwin “I spent half the night working on your story. It’s the best out of the lot.”

I’d love to get a POV section for Talmanes, since the man seems constantly amused by Mat. I enjoyed Mat’s observation that Talmanes isn’t as serious as Mat first took him to be, but in fact just keeps his mirth inside. As a side character, Talmanes is really growing on me, and I can see how he’s fit in with the Band so well, despite being nobility when most everyone else isn’t.

An aside: Mat was so obviously the group’s Pippin that I often forget not to picture him the same way I picture Pippin when I read The Lord of the Rings. Basically I just picture them exactly the same, except Mat wears shoes and different clothes. I always imagine him as really short, too, although he isn’t supposed to be. It’s funny how the brain makes associations and those associations shape how we perceive people.

But then, that is true of Mat no matter who he is dealing with. Everyone holds onto a very specific image where he is concerned, usually based a lot on first impressions. Perhaps it is just because Mat has a very strong personality or maybe it’s because he tries to hide his braver, more selfless side—even from himself. One of the fascinating things about Mat is how his character demonstrates what true courage looks like. There is no shame in fear—if you’re not afraid of the Dark, there’s something wrong with you—and self preservation is natural. The difficulty Mat runs into isn’t that he’s afraid; it’s that he wants to define himself a certain way, and that definition doesn’t match up with the reality of who he is, but it does make him come off as an irresponsible cad to people before they can see the truth through his actions.

He’s sort of in the opposite position from Rand, in a way. In chapter 35, Rand remembers the man he was when he came to Falme the first time, as though that was a different person entirely;he thinks of Rand the shepherd as being burned into ash, and the Dragon Reborn as someone who took his place.

But this isn’t the perspective Rand had back when he first declared himself as the Dragon Reborn. He didn’t blink and move from the state he was then into the state he exists in now, and the Rand of that moment or the weeks that followed probably would have a different perspective on the experience. Rand has reached a point where everything feels inevitable to him, especially his own literal and figurative demise, and it’s coloring his view of the past.

The battle at Falme was a traumatic one for Rand, especially since it was there that he received his first un-healing wound, but it was also a triumph. They beat back the Seanchan, Egwene was saved, and Rand proved his strength and power, to himself as much as to the world. He could take this moment to be reminded of what he can do, of how he was able to trust Nynaeve to take care of Egwene, how friends like Loial helped him succeed and a Darkfriend turned back to the light in his presence. Instead, he thinks only of destruction, and the fact that he doesn’t believe any remnant of the man he used to be still exists within him.

Rand sees only his capacity for violence and destruction, even though his purpose and his intention is to save the world from Darkness. Mat focuses on his desire for diversion and irresponsibility despite how he has proven himself again and again as a reliable friend, soldier, and leader. Both make these choices out of fear, I think: fear of failure, fear of death, fear of the opinions of others.

Mat’s desire to avoid any more surprises is a familiar one to me, as I imagine it is to many readers. He tells Thom that he’s tired of being surprised, and that he plans to take charge of his own destiny, rather than running from problem to problem; then he is promptly shown how impossible that goal is to achieve, as the woman who is looking for him turns out to be an ally (ostensibly) and all his preparations are interrupted before he even has a chance to set out for Trustair.

There is no plan Mat could possibly have made that would have anticipated what happened in Hinderstap. The next time he encounters an effect of the Dark One or some Forsaken trap, it will also be something he could not have anticipated and will have to adapt to on the fly.

But anxiety is something that is most quickly soothed by giving in to it. I always think of it like a mosquito bite—the temptation is always to scratch and get the immediate relief, and it can be hard to remember, in the moment of discomfort, that in the long run the bite will heal much more quickly if left alone. Mat’s night spent planning what is basically an assault on Trustair was scratching that itch, trying to soothe the fear he experienced in Hinderstap and the worry that something like that will happen again.

This metaphor is getting away from me a little, but I think you all know what I’m getting at.

What is most interesting to me about Mat’s attempts to prepare for what cannot be anticipated, and to have a plan for every possible outcome, is that Mat is very adept at thinking on his feet and getting out of impossible situations with a combination of luck, skill, and having surrounded himself with talented friends and allies. He has survived bizarre and impossible situations by adapting in the moment, not by planning ahead. And yet he returns again and again to the idea that avoidance is the best way to handle potential problems.

The silliness of Mat’s pages of backstory for each of his characters gives the scene a lighthearted and comedic air, which is a nice addition at this point in the book, but it also struck me as a great way of illustrating the concept that trying to plan for every contingency is ultimately a silly thing to do, even though it may feel good in the moment. Mat would have been better served getting a good night’s rest than he was by spending all that time on plans that he now has no use for and backstories that make no sense. Even more than that, it was his need to plan ahead and anticipate everything that got him into trouble—or would have, if the person looking for him had turned out to be a foe, instead of an ally. It was the very merchant Mat paid to draw the map who told Verin where to find him. 

I do, however, appreciate Mat’s desire for “good drama.”

I am interested to see what comes of Verin’s claim that she was caught up in Mat’s ta’veren web. I have always taken everything Verin says with a grain of salt, ever since she lied to Rand back in The Great Hunt by claiming Moiraine sent her to find him. We knew this wasn’t true, and it’s hard (though not impossible) to imagine how Verin could have made that into an obfuscation rather than an outright lie. Perhaps by deliberately misinterpreting something Moiraine said to her, twisting words and intent in her mind until she convinced herself that was what Moiraine meant?

Verin appears to want to protect Rand. Not only did she use her version of Compulsion to get all the captive Aes Sedai to swear loyalty to him, but she also considered poisoning Cadsuane until she decided that Cadsuane was also trying to help and protect Rand. We also know that the Dark has been given orders not to injure or kill Rand. This doesn’t really go very far in explaining the fact that Verin has been doing more than just making sure nobody near him takes a shot.

Next week we’ll read her explanation of what she is doing there and how she was caught by Mat’s ta’veren pull, but for now, I will just say how easy it would be to lie about something like that, if you were a person able to lie. “Oh no, I definitely have a reason to be out here in the middle of nowhere distributing pictures of you and your friend. It’s definitely not because I’m a Darkfriend and Moridin ordered your death. It’s, uh… it’s because the Pattern made me do it!”

If Mat did somehow pull her to him with his ta’veren need, that would also be a factor of his ta’veren powers we haven’t yet seen, just like his apparent ability to consciously control the direction in which his luck works. It’s very in line, however, with my general understanding of how ta’veren work: by pulling threads of the Pattern (in other words, the lives of human beings) in certain directions. We’ve seen Rand’s ta’veren power pull people to him many times, including the consistent pull to reach him that both Mat and Perrin are currently experiencing. So Verin’s explanation is perfectly plausible, but I just also think that would make it a really convenient lie.

Speaking of ta’veren pulls and the question of how consciously one can direct such a power, I was fascinated to see Tuon resist Rand during their meeting. Whatever else one might think of the woman, this was an incredible feat of determination. While we have seen people say no to Rand before, they generally tend to act almost as though without thought when his ta’veren nature takes hold of someone. When it happened to the Sea Folk while he was bargaining with them, they seemed unaware of any influence until after they had already spoken, and then were perplexed by their own decisions. More than one person has made a decision under Rand’s influence and then had their own reactions explained to them afterwards by a nearby Aes Sedai, or occasionally by Rand himself. But we’ve never been in someone’s POV and watch them clock that pull and actively resist it.

Tuon doesn’t even know what’s happening to her in that moment. She has only recently heard of the concept of ta’veren, and dismissed it at once as superstition, but she is aware of something, of her sudden desire to please Rand, and to think of all the reasons doing what he wants would benefit her. She actively attempts to think of objections to those reasons, to think of why it would be a bad idea to agree to his proposal, and even when she can’t find those objections and can’t make her mind hold onto them, she still resists him.

There are several possible explanations for Tuon’s ability to resist Rand. The first is that her upbringing has given her a particularly strong mental fortitude, one that even a twisting of the Pattern isn’t fully able to overcome. Rand’s nature only twists chance, it doesn’t guarantee outcomes, and it does seem likely that the chance of Tuon breaking away from her duty to subdue the lands and become the leader of everything, including the Dragon Reborn, are slim.

It’s also possible that Tuon herself is ta’veren. I don’t believe that anyone capable of seeing that trait has ever been in her presence, and the possibility has been raised before, though I forget now which character it was who said it. This idea is particularly intriguing because it lends some weight to her belief that she is meant to lead in the Last Battle. We, the readers, know that it has to be Rand, but Tuon is clearly an important player, and her being ta’veren would add to that importance, both literally and symbolically.

If Tuon’s resistance to Rand’s influence was due either to mental fortitude or to some ta’veren nature of her own, this has some interesting implications on what her life with Mat will be like.

Now, another possible explanation for Tuon’s resistance is that there was no chance, not even the slimmest of possibilities, that she would agree to his terms. This seems unlikely, given how chance and probability works, but I find myself unable to entirely dismiss the notion. After all, Tuon is a creature of mental strength and dedication to her duty, and she fully believes that it is not only her right but also her obligation to be the leader of every land and to control the Dragon Reborn during the Last Battle. This is what the Seanchan prophecies say, after all, and Tuon fully believes in prophecy and omens. She has also been raised since birth to believe in her duty to the Seanchan and the world. Perhaps there is no version of events that would see her turning aside from that dedication, even slightly.

Of course, there is a possibility that Rand’s power didn’t work as he intended because it’s broken. We have seen evidence that he no longer causes a good for every ill, that the balance of the effects he creates seems to be no longer, well, balanced. If this is so, the effects of his touching the “True Power” may be tainting his ta’veren abilities in other ways, too. After Tuon fails to get her mind to hold on to all the reasons not to agree to Rand’s proposal, even as she finds agreement on the tip of her tongue, she observes the darkness around Rand. The narrative doesn’t explicitly say that the darkness is the reason she finds the strength to say no, but the association does rather imply it.

I could almost believe, based on how these passages play out, that it was the dark halo around Rand that pushed Tuon to be able to resist his influence. And after all, the effect of the Dark One—his touch, his taint, his Power—is directly counter to the Pattern, so much so that it actively tears and dissolves the threads. So it would make sense if this part of Rand’s abilities has been altered, just like his affect on chance seems to be.

Which is a chilling thought.

It was interesting to see Rand attempting to target his ta’veren ability to sway people. He brings in the word “need” several times, which reminded me of one of Moiraine’s earliest lesson to him. Back in the first book, when they realized the Dark One’s plan and needed to find the Eye of the World and thwart him, Moiraine spoke of how she believed that every one of them was brought to that moment, and that the information was brought to that moment, on purpose by the Pattern. She also believed that she would be able to find the Eye even though she has already been there, because the Eye of the World responds to someone’s need.

Rand is aware that he twists the Pattern around him, and that the results work in his favor when his ta’veren ability works on others; we saw this during the negotiations with Harine and the Sea Folk, as a particularly clear example. He also believes that the Aes Sedai captured at Dumai’s Wells were drawn to swear to him because of his ta’veren pull. It seems that he is very aware that his needs, and possibly his desires, are driving this affect, and is trying to concentrate that onto Tuon, as though he’s reminding the Pattern what is needed.

The idea that Rand can point and shoot his ta’veren influence isn’t as much a revelation as the idea that Mat can, though it is a bit of a step from how we’ve seen this play out before. Just because it was clear that Rand wanted the full weight of that ability to come to bear against Tuon doesn’t mean he was able to manipulate the ability; he might have just been focusing really hard in the hope that it would tip the balance.

I liked how Rand looked at Tuon and marveled at how young and small she looked, and then a passage later Tuon was briefly surprised by how young Rand was. Both also consider, at one point or another, how little the protection they had with them would help if the other side attacked—Rand thought about how only a quick escape via Gateway or the extra power from the Choedan Kal would give him a chance to withstand the might of so many damane, while Tuon thinks about her guards and the distance between herself and Rand and how none of it makes any difference if he decides to harm her.

The parallels also exist in that they both have been told that it is their job to unite the world and to lead everyone into the Last Battle. It seems obvious that the Seanchan prophecies have been altered or misunderstood in some way (Tuon herself thinks in one passage that the prophecies can sometimes be difficult to decipher). Of course the Dragon could kneel before the Empress, as the Seanchan prophecies say he will, even if ultimately he is not placed under her control or command. It could be a gesture of respect or deference, not of fealty or submission.

However, from where Tuon is sitting, she has been raised on the idea that the Seanchan Empress must lead the world in the Last Battle; she sees this as her ultimate duty. She isn’t like Elaida, who read the prophecies that said the Dragon would do all these things and still thought she should, and could, keep him imprisoned and use him like a weapon (like a damane) to be wielded by the Amyrlin during Tarmon Gai’don. Tuon has been told this is her duty; she believes that the prophecies say that this is her duty, and that the fate of the world rests on her shoulders.

In this, she and Rand are the same, and it’s no wonder that they couldn’t reach an agreement. Each of them sees their own capitulation as something that would doom the world.

Tuon’s next step is to attack the White Tower, which won’t cow or weaken Rand in the way she wants it to but will anger him. I can’t help thinking that this attack will be devastating, not only to the Aes Sedai but to the world. Even if the Seanchan are repelled, all it takes is for them to return back to their territory with one Aes Sedai who knows how to Travel, and the situation of the war will be drastically altered. As altered as it will be by the production of Aludra’s dragons, maybe.

What I find much more interesting is the question of how, eventually, Tuon can be brought to change her perspective, to understand that some things—some beliefs, some traditions, some rules—that are intrinsic to the Seanchan way of life will have to change. The Empress can’t stand higher than the Dragon Reborn, whatever the cultural rules say. But how can anyone convince her of this? And who will it be? Rand? Or Mat? Or someone else?

Do they have any omens for “You’re on the wrong path, you actually have to drastically alter the way you think about the structure of your society and the Imperial family?”

Anyway, we’ll cover the next two chapters next week, in which we get more information from Verin, and more information from Tuon, who is due for a name change as she takes on her new position as Empress. Plus we finally get a chapter from Min’s perspective, which I have been desperate for since the whole debacle with Semirhage and the collar.

Rand thinks Min can’t see him the same way, can’t love him the same way, now that he has nearly killed her, but I don’t think that’s true at all. If Min is subdued and hesitant with him, it has more to do with how he is behaving after that encounter than anything else. But we’ll have to wait for her own words to understand more.

Rand could stand to do the same.[end-mark]

The post Reading The Wheel of Time: Verin and Tuon Deal with Ta’veren Nonsense in<i>The Gathering Storm</i> (Part 21) appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations

Five Sci-Fi Stories About the Dark Side of A.I.

A.I. may be everywhere, but we don’t have to like it…

By Lorna Wallace

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Published on April 2, 2026

Sea of Rust cover art by Dominic Harman

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Sea of Rust cover art by Dominic Harman

Back in 2024, I wrote a list compiling AI characters from science fiction who I’d love to befriend. Real-world generative AI was picking up steam and I wasn’t feeling great about it, so I found it somewhat comforting to turn to these characters that I felt an affinity for. (I’m not the only one who is able to hold conflicting feelings about fictional and real-world AI, as explored in this Reactor essay by Samit Basu.)

Well, a couple of years have passed since then and I feel even worse about the spread of AI and how it’s negatively impacting… seemingly everything? While there’s definitely still a place in my heart for sci-fi stories about lovable AIs (they could never make me hate you, Murderbot!), I am feeling increasingly more ill-disposed towards the technology as it’s being applied in our day-to-day lives. So with that in mind, here are five stories about killer robots and AIs that help feed into my ever-growing animosity toward the whole rotten enterprise.

“Second Variety” by Philip K. Dick (1953)

“Second Variety” is set in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has now turned into a robot war. Russian bombing has left America a wasteland, driving the surviving population into underground bunkers. But scientists have come up with a seemingly genius solution to fight off the encroaching enemy: lethal robotic balls covered in blades. These robots have even been designed to repair themselves, meaning that no one on the American side has to risk death by spiky sphere.

But Major Joseph Hendricks learns that things have gone terribly awry with their robotic soldiers when he ventures across the wasteland to negotiate with the Russians. Let’s just say that designing a technology that has the intelligence to fix itself might lead to some unintended—and, for the human race, extremely dire—scientific advancements.

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison (1967)

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” is a title that instantly evokes horror and, thankfully, the story itself absolutely lives up to the expectations set by those words.

Ted, Ellen, Benny, Nimdok, and Gorrister are the only human beings left alive on Earth. They’re the few survivors of World War III, which saw the United States, Russia, and China each build a supercomputer—known as an AM (Allied Mastercomputer)—to coordinate their attacks on one another. One of these computers eventually gained sentience, subsumed the others, and then promptly wiped out humanity. Our five remaining humans were spared by AM, but it wasn’t an act of mercy—it was an act of torture.

This is an incredibly dark story that taps into a strain of horror that is at once existential and stomach-churning. Although it’s short and can be read very quickly, it’s sure to linger on in the dark recesses of your mind.

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson (2011)

Pieced together from interviews and recordings, Robopocalypse is a history of the war that machines waged against humanity under the command of an artificial intelligence called Archos. We know from the very start that humanity narrowly managed to survive and win, and while that may erase some narrative tension, there are still plenty of thrills to be had, and the details of how the war was won are fascinating in themselves.

Chapters flit between a range of characters—many of whom we revisit as the war progresses—from an Osage Nation cop to a Japanese tech genius to a British teenage hacker. Each character draws on their own unique skill set and creativity to outwit the mechanical enemy. And aside from being a compelling story of hope and survival, the fact that Daniel H. Wilson has a PhD in Robotics really shows on the page.

“We Are All Misfit Toys in the Aftermath of the Velveteen War” by Seanan McGuire (2014)

“The Velveteen War” is a deceptively pleasant name for what is an incredibly horrific conflict. From the perspective of pediatrician Morgan Williams, the reader learns that when AI was created, it was tested out in the education sector (a seemingly safer option than in government or the military). Dolls and toys were soon stuffed with the technology, giving children the chance to learn while also playing. After lulling the adult population into a false sense of security, the AI-infused toys then attacked in a particularly insidious way.

Waging a war against toys might not sound that difficult, but anyone who has seen Small Soldiers (1998) will know that small stature doesn’t necessarily limit military might. Plus, in Seanan McGuire’s hands this potentially silly idea is twisted into a tale that is both disturbing and somber.

This short story was first published in the 2014 anthology Robot Uprisings (linked above), but it can also be found in McGuire’s collection Laughter at the Academy (2019).

Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill (2017)

The previous four stories on this list are told from a human point of view, but that isn’t possible in Sea of Rust because the last human was killed 15 years before the story starts. In this version of the robot uprising, the machines won and have inherited the planet, but doesn’t mean that Earth is now an AI utopia. Instead, it’s more like a robotic version of the Wild West.

Many robots have joined a One World Intelligence—essentially the shared consciousness of millions of AI beings—but main character Brittle isn’t willing to give up her independence. She spends her time wandering the wasteland for spare parts and eking out a living in the few remaining free towns, all the while doing her best to avoid the OWI—a task that’s getting harder day by day.

Brittle may have had a hand in humanity’s extinction (which we see in flashback chapters), but C. Robert Cargill uses her to explore some very human emotions and themes—including crushing feelings of guilt and the importance of individuality and free will.

There are many, many other stories out there about AI and robots deciding to turn on humanity, so feel free to recommend your favorites in the comments below.[end-mark]

The post Five Sci-Fi Stories About the Dark Side of A.I. appeared first on Reactor.

Books book bans

What to Know About the National Book Ban Bill

House Resolution 7661 is a potentially significant piece of book ban legislation. Here’s what you need to know about it.

By Matthew Byrd

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Published on April 1, 2026

Photo by Michael Dziedzic [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Michael Dziedzic [via Unsplash]

On March 17, the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce advanced H.R. 7661. There is no word regarding when the bill will be voted on, but the vote is expected to occur sometime in the coming weeks. While that bill number may not sound familiar, there’s a good chance you have recently heard it referred to as the National Book Ban Bill.

Though that title is not formally associated with the proposed resolution, it does speak to the concerns many have regarding the bill’s language, intentions, and potential long-term impact. While it can understandably feel overwhelming to keep up with every potentially impactful piece of legislation in the modern United States government, the details of H. R. 7661 (including those not printed, which only exist between the lines) make it worth knowing about for anyone who opposes the growing trend of book bans and public education funding.

What is H. R. 7661, or the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act?

Formally, what is sometimes referred to as the National Book Ban Bill is being presented as H.R. 7661 or the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.” You can read that act here. It has also been referred to as the “National Don’t Say Gay bill,” a reference to a 2022 statute that triggered significant school policy changes, including legislation that restricted public schools from introducing material in kindergarten through 3rd-grade classrooms that was deemed to be related to matters of sexual orientation and gender identity. The law also included requirements specific to students in higher grades and age ranges.

A sweeping initiative, the Don’t Say Gay bill (formally referred to as the “Parental Rights in Education” bill) established several education restrictions regarding both curricula and school policies that could be enforced via various means (including potential legal action). It required schools to inform parents if their children received any mental health services at school, it allowed parents to have greater access to formerly private documents related to their kids, and it enacted a series of moderation policies that effectively enabled legislators to have greater control over what is (and isn’t) taught to students in those age ranges via funding decisions and similar policies. Said policies included book bans, which are also at the heart of H.R. 7661’s many potential effects.

The Main Provisions of H. R. 7661

The primary purpose of H. R. 7661 is to enable the U.S. government to deny federal funding to schools that use those funds for programs and materials the bill deems to be inappropriate.

The bill is effectively an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The act was designed to provide expanded federal funding to public schools to ensure that their students (more specifically, public school students in lower-income areas) didn’t continue to fall far behind students at schools with access to more resources. It was a milestone piece of legislation that remains one of the cornerstones for federal public school funding in the United States to this day.

While H. R. 7661 would not eliminate that act, it would, in the bill’s own language, “prohibit the use of funds provided under such Act to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, and for other purposes.”

The broad nature of that language is one of the more controversial aspects of the bill. For instance, it would deny schools the ability to use federal funding for programs, literature, and related texts that include “sexually oriented material” and “material that exposes such children to nude adults, individuals who are stripping, or lewd or lascivious dancing.” H. R. 7661 also includes exemptions for scientific texts, works related to major religions, as well as “classic works of literature” and “classic works of art” (more on those in a bit) that may naturally include references to the content it intends to restrict. Furthermore, the authors of the bill note that “sexually oriented material” includes “any depiction, description, or simulation of sexually explicit conduct (as defined in subparagraphs (A) and (B) of section 2256(2) of title 18, United States Code).” You can read those United States Code subparagraphs here. They largely reference material such as “bestiality” and “sadistic or masochistic abuse” but also include the far more general idea of “sexual intercourse… whether between persons of the same or opposite sex” as sexually explicit content. It is a rather large collection of topics which could potentially fall under that umbrella definition.

However, H. R. 7661 would expand the definition of “sexually oriented material” to include material that “involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism.” Along with suggesting that matters of identity should be considered a sexually obscene topic, the inclusion of that language has significant legal implications. That choice of wording makes it clear that this bill will most directly and immediately affect transgender students, transgender-related materials, and it could be argued, gender non-conformity topics in general, which may include discussions of specifically prohibited subjects in affected schools. 

What’s important to remember is that the bill specifies works that will be excluded, but it is more vague regarding what, exactly, could be impacted. It could, for instance, be determined that a variety of LGBTQIA+ books that make passing reference (or even perceived passing references) to such materials could also be effectively banned from federally funded schools. The policies for such determinations and review procedures are not set. It should also be noted that the use of “sexually oriented material” and similar pieces of broad language have often been contested as the basis for similar pieces of legislation (more on those below). 

There are undoubtedly concerns regarding the direct targeting of students and materials that would be most obviously impacted by the “gender dysphoria or transgenderism” language. The reason that this is being referred to as a “National Book Ban Bill,” though, is due to both the bill’s relationship with current federal funding policies (and thus its potential reach) and the ways that its language could be used to legally justify a variety of bans or create a precedent for similarly sweeping bills. 

What Would Happen If H. R. 7661 Passes?

Due to the potentially expansive nature of this bill and the ways its language could ultimately be interpreted, its full potential effects are difficult to predict. However, there are a few figures that capture the potential scope of this act and its effects. 

The National Center for Educational Statistics states that 63 percent of traditional public schools and 62 percent of public charter schools were eligible for Title I funding as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act during the 2021-2022 school year. The exact number of schools that received said funding and how much funding they received can be difficult to track from year to year, given the scope of the program and the sometimes inconsistent reporting on a state-by-state level. Some estimates suggest that we’re looking at around 50,000 schools that regularly benefit from the program. The National Center for Educational Statistics estimates that there were 99,200 public schools in the United States as of the 2021-2022 school year.

While some of those schools rely on more Title I funding than others, federal funding remains a vital part of many public schools’ operating budgets. And as other recent reports regarding Title I funding in public schools suggest, qualifying schools remain especially dependent on any level of federal funding at a time when other funding resources are drying up, and public schools are making cutbacks to essentials while battling a variety of state and local laws that impact their funding and operations. 

All of this is to say that H. R. 7661 could potentially require nearly half of U.S. public schools to comply with these new laws or risk losing vital federal funds. To put it another way, this bill would not repeal the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, but it would play a significant role in determining whether the tens of thousands of schools and millions of students that the act was intended to help will continue to receive its intended benefits.

What exactly compliance with H. R. 7661 will ultimately look like is very much up for debate. There is quite a bit of room for interpretation regarding the potential extent of its effects. But at a time when public schools are increasingly dependent on federal funding for not just closing the education gap but remaining operational, those schools would be heavily incentivized to comply by removing whatever is ultimately considered to be offensive programs and texts. In the future, the nature of their curricula and available materials would also be strongly dictated by compliance with this act.

The Exemptions For “Art” and “Classics” in H. R. 7661 and Who Determines Them

The aforementioned exemptions mentioned in H. R. 7661 reveal not only the specific works deemed to be “art” or “classics,” but the nature of the organization that would determine those exemptions. 

The bill notes that exemptions to this policy will be determined by works featured in the Smarthistory guide to AP Art History, volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 (2019–2020), the Great Books of the Western World published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, and lists of classic books published by Compass Classroom. While Encyclopaedia Britannica and AP Art History are more historically entrenched names, this might be the first time you’re hearing about Compass Classroom.

Compass Classroom produces online homeschool curricula that the company says are designed to teach and promote a “Christian worldview.” Founded in 2010 as Visual Latin, they have expanded their program across various educational fields and subjects. However, it is not clear how many users they currently have or why Compass Classroom’s “Classics Every Middle Schooler Should Read” and “Classics Every High Schooler Should Read” lists are cited as exemption references in this bill. Regardless of opinions regarding the specific works included on those lists (which contain everything from Common Sense by Thomas Paine and The Lord of the Rings trilogy), critics of this bill have raised questions about why a Christian-focused homeschool curriculum company is potentially legally defining arts and classics, as well as why this particular company was chosen to make those distinctions. 

The Biggest Supporters of H. R. 7661

The full list of representatives who introduced H. R. 7661 can be found at the top of the bill itself. However, the bill’s biggest proponent is Illinois Representative Mary Miller.

Since being elected to the House of Representatives in 2020, Mary Miller has been a vocal adversary of the transgender community. In 2021, she introduced the Safety and Opportunity for Girls Act, which would have determined, among other things, which bathrooms transgender students are allowed to use in schools. In 2025, she called for a federal investigation of Illinois’ decision to allow transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports. That same year, she misgendered Representative Sarah McBride while introducing her. 

However, Mary Miller’s most notable controversy in regards to this bill occurred in 2021 when she was filmed during a speech saying, “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” Miller was criticized for her statements by members of the Republican and Democratic parties as well as various advocacy organizations. Mary apologized for her statement a few days later, but noted that “This dark history should never be repeated and parents should be proactive to instill what is good, true, right, and noble into their children’s hearts and minds.” That statement is being reexamined in light of the nature of H. R. 7661.

What Precedent Is There For H. R. 7661 to Pass?

On a federal level, there is little historical precedent that suggests H. R. 7661 will pass. In fact, a bill with a similar name and slightly different language (H.R. 9197, also referred to as the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act”) ultimately never made it out of Congress. H.R. 2616 (the PROTECT Kids Act) may be a closer comparison. It also included provisions related to removing federal funding for schools that made “sex-based accommodations” for students and was similarly compared to the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. That bill also did not pass Congress. The Parental Bill of Rights Act (which featured some overlapping provisions and somewhat similar ideas) passed through the house but was not taken up by the Senate. 

Since H. R. 7661 was introduced, some critics of the bill have treated it as something that will almost certainly never become a law in its current form. While there are numerous precedents that support that viewpoint, recent laws passed at the state and local levels have some concerned that we may no longer be able to comfortably rely on federal precedents.

If it feels like you have been reading more and more stories about books being banned in schools and libraries in recent years than you ever heard before, it’s because you probably have. Since 2021, there has been a noted rise in state laws that enable communities to have greater control over what books are allowed in K-12 schools. As PEN America reports, the majority of those bans in recent years have been led by advocacy groups, though a growing number are more directly associated with elected officials. 

During the same period, there has been a well-documented rise in laws that target transgender people: the group most directly targeted by H. R. 7661. Translegislation.com has identified 747 introduced laws since 2021 that would negatively impact the rights of transgender and non-conforming people in some way. 308 of those laws have been passed, with recent years seeing a substantial increase in laws introduced and passed (2025 was a record year for both). 23 bills considered to be anti-trans in some way have been passed in 2026 so far. 

And though this has been referenced throughout this article, it is worth mentioning again that 2022 was the year that Florida passed the controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The implementation of that law sparked a new era of state and federal government officials either introducing laws that utilize book bans as part of a “sexual content”-driven agenda or working to implement laws that will prevent such bans from occurring. During that same time, we have seen a rise in teachers effectively self-censoring their lessons out of fear of punishment or simple confusion over how, exactly, they can be in compliance with existing laws. 

While the validity of the popular idea that we are living in unprecedented times depends on a number of technicalities and interpretations that often interfere with the spirit of the statement, those numbers support the idea that we are living in an era of book bans being used to enforce certain ideologies and suppress others that we have not seen in the United States for quite some time. 

What Can You Do If You Oppose H. R. 7661?

If you oppose H. R. 7661, there are a few practical actions you can take to help prevent it from being passed. 

• You can contact your representatives to let them know that you are a constituent who opposes this act. 5Calls has a page dedicated to this act that will help tell you what to say to your representative’s office, as well as find their contact information. 

• Similarly, you may consider supporting H.R. 6440 (aka the “Right to Read Act of 2025”). This act would expand the funding that many community libraries receive as well as help protect library staff against legal actions associated with book bans. As always, please be sure to study the bill’s exact intended effects and provisions before contacting your representatives. 

• Unite Against Book Bans, the Office for Intellectual Freedom, PEN America, and the International Literacy Association remain some of the most popular and trusted groups for resources and information related to stopping book bans such as H. R. 7661. There are numerous similar organizations and communities at local, state, and federal levels that offer and accept similar support. You can find some of them here.

And though these sometimes feel like minor acts of civil reform, it is always worth saying that some of the best things you can do is support your local libraries and librarians, support the individuals and groups most commonly affected by similar laws, and help spread the joy and importance of reading by donating books, donating your time, and simply continuing to read. [end-mark]

The post What to Know About the National Book Ban Bill appeared first on Reactor.

Books Reading the Weird

If NOT CAT Then NOT VAMPIRE: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 4)

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on April 1, 2026

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 7-8 of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead!

The Absolution of Three-Persons—April 11, 1912: It’s been four days since Good Stab stabbed Arthur Beaucarne “to the quick” with his tale. The pastor has spent this time dissecting the Blackfeet’s story, studying each piece, then trying to “puzzle them all together again into a narrative [he] can begin to accept.”

Arthur’s “provisional conjecture” discounts “the more fantastic elements.” Perhaps Good Stab suffered some “catastrophic loss” related to the Marias River massacre which forced him to winter alone in the wilderness. This isolation and privation could have brought on delusions that, to Good Stab, rendered “the impossible… unassailable fact.”

Arthur catalogs the delusions. Good Stab was infected with a curse by a “Cat Man.” He’d henceforth subsist by drinking blood, enabled by senses beyond both human and animal ken. He’d be resilient to disease, accidental injuries, and intentional attacks, healing quickly from lesser wounds, dying only temporarily from mortal ones. Monstrous gluttony forced him to drain each victim to the last drop of living blood; if he persisted past the victim’s last heartbeat, the remaining blood would sicken him. The way that Good Stab gradually takes on “four-foot” characteristics if he eats animals reminds Arthur of “some ancient lay… complete with justice and chivalry,” of which he’s forgotten the details.

On the liability side, Good Stab claims to be hypersensitive to sunlight, and can ingest no solid foods or liquids apart from blood. Another liability, Arthur considers not necessarily supernatural or evil. Good Stab deplores succumbing to deep torpor after feeding. Some mortals, including Arthur, find “extreme satiation” a welcome numbing of thought, allowing for “communion with Creation that speaks ineluctably of wholeness.” Not that Arthur doesn’t regret it when he stumbles drunkenly around the church blubbering apologies to the crucified Jesus, or when he stuffs himself with parishioner-donated food until he’s ill.

The first Sunday, Arthur observed that dogs dislike Good Stab. This last Sunday, he observed something more troubling. Instead of swallowing the Host, Good Stab must have hidden it in his sleeve, because later he dropped it in the street. Whether he did this in disrespect for the white man’s religion or because the Host was solid food doesn’t matter—the sacrilege is Arthur’s fault. He should never have let someone not of the Faith participate in communion.

On Tuesday, the first murdered man is buried. Arthur struggles through the aftermath of a food binge to officiate at the funeral. Twenty townspeople attend, drawn by curiosity rather than grief. Good Stab is not there, but another stranger is: a neatly dressed and shaven man holding a bowler hat. He departs with Sheriff Doyle after a nod to Arthur. As penance for his latest gluttony, Arthur remains while the gravediggers finish their work. From the top of the town “boot hill,” he looks out across the prairie. He imagines how Good Stab must have crossed it the night he walked into Miles City, and he wishes he could have seen his approach—and “scurried away.”

April 13, 1912: Arthur learns from the boarding house porch-sitters that there’s a Blackfeet man living on the outskirts of town. He buys a thick rasher of bacon, that universally-desirable food, and visits a dingy tent before which the aged Amos Short Ribs huddles over a dung fire. The bacon accepted and cooking, Arthur tries to learn whether Amos has ever seen a domestic cat—one small doubt he has about Good Stab’s story is that back in 1870, a Blackfeet shouldn’t have known what a such a feline was, much less name his monster Cat Man. Getting nowhere with mere descriptions, the embarrassed but desperate Arthur borrows the brothel’s orange mouser. Amos’ reverent fascination with the animal proves it is new to him.

As Arthur’s about to depart, Amos asks after “the Fullblood” he’s seen exiting the church. Amos had thought the man dead, killed for what he did to the buffalo hunters. Asked just what the Fullblood did, Amos points with lips and chin to the prairie. Thinking of the flayed corpses found near town, Arthur asks if the Fullblood is the one painting—

But Amos suddenly disappears into his tent. The stranger from the funeral walks up. He introduces himself as Dove. Just Dove. He’s come by coach from San Francisco, and he produces credentials naming him a Pinkerton of the famous detective agency. Arthur may be able to help him with his current case. A San Francisco family has set him on the trail of… he can’t say what. But various clues have led him to believe “they” are now in or around Miles City.

Dove then looks Arthur in the eye, watching for his reaction, and adds: “Parts of them anyway, Father. I can’t say for certain where their skin is.”

The Degenerate Dutch: Beaucarne is continually surprised by Native Americans being “rhetorically capable,” or indeed speaking English.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Obviously Good Stab became delusional while lost in the wilderness, confusing his hallucinations with what he actually did for survival. Something something narratives, something something cats.

Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: The main metric that Beaucarne tracks is his own sins, with a preference for those falling into easy categories over the ones he’d prefer not to think about. This week there’s gluttony (drunkenness and binge-eating), despair (subsequent to the drinking), and vanity (looking at his teeth in a mirror).

Ruthanna’s Commentary

Sorry, this is what happens when our whole weekly reading involves Arthur Beaucarne trying to disprove scary stories. We still don’t know why Good Stab’s story is so scary to him, except that it clearly has something to do with skinned buffalo, and skinned buffalo hunters, and old sins that Beaucarne doesn’t want to think about. So instead he’s borrowing cats from the local cathouse. And misquoting Shakespeare so as to emphasize the unbridgeable barrier between civilized White Man and savage.

To contrast with Beaucarne’s amateur investigation, a Pinkerton shows up. During the U.S. Civil War, the Pinkerton Agency did espionage work for the Union; by this time they’re both the largest private law enforcement agency in the world and primarily known for strikebreaking. They also did a certain amount of tracking western outlaws, so it makes sense that they would be on the trail of a serial killer in Miles City. Ruthless, competent, and eager to support the status quo, they may be a problem for Good Stab. And if they know more about the situation than the reader, they may be a problem for Beaucarne as well.

Meanwhile, Chance Aubrey is hanging around the telegraph office, obsessing over the Titanic. That’s not symbolic at all. Beaucarne considers it “hubris for the creations of men,” though he manages to avoid preaching over sausages.

Hubris is, of course, a very civilized sin. Beaucarne values hard work to get the most (by European definitions) from what G-d has given you. Avoid exploiting land until you’ve extracted all possible resources, and you don’t deserve to keep it at all. Railroads and telegraphs prove Manifest Destiny. So where’s the line? Is it just how much you invoke G-d in your excitement? It’s Kipling-ish, this confidence in one’s own cultural superiority bolstered by a purely religious humility that requires no mortal-world questioning of assumptions:

Respect the divine, kneel in church, and doubt any word from the “lesser breeds”—what else do you need to stay ahead in life? Beaucarne, I hope, is soon to find out.

Anne’s Commentary

If weird narrative has a core feature, a hard-beating heart, it’s the protagonistic impulse to explain away the inexplicable until compelled to acknowledge its existence. After struggles protracted or sharp, characters have to reconfigure their worldview to include the new aspect of reality, whether they thereafter accept it, flee it, or fight to drive it out of their immediate breathing space, their minute acre of the universe. In Old West parlance, they could tell the Weird this town ain’t big enough for the two of us, so git or draw.

Problem with the latter alternative is that the Weird’s generally packing the bigger gun and quicker trigger appendage.

In this week’s chapter, Graham Jones does a superb job of harrying Arthur Beaucarne through the incredulous phase. Arthur takes a firmly rational approach to Good Stab’s confession. His “provisional conjecture” is that the fantastic elements of his story are just that, fantastical. He’s generous enough to provisionally entertain the possibility that, rather than perpetrating deliberate fraud, Good Stab suffers from a posttraumatic delusion. Arthur can expose this by picking apart the confession and “[puzzling the pieces] back together again into a narrative [he] can begin to accept.”

Arthur has little trouble constructing a situation dire enough to have overset Good Stab’s reason. Whether or not he was alive as far back as the Marias Massacre (unlikely), Major Baker’s actions against the Blackfeet could have personally injured Good Stab. When forced for whatever reason to spend a winter alone near the Massacre site, he might have confounded his trial with that of his forebears, weaving a tortuous story to explain how he, who looks too young for it, was actually an adult in 1870.

One of the boarding house porchsitters might diagnose Good Stab as crazy like a loon. Arthur also allows he could be crazy like a fox, a boldly deceptive trickster out to con an old white man, or at least to torment him with a tale too closely paralleling the pastor’s guilty history.

At the same time, Arthur recognizes he may be “arranging angels on the head of a pin” by concocting possible inconsistencies in Good Stab’s confession, as niggling as whether a Blackfoot would have known about domestic cats in 1870. That doesn’t stop him from hunting up a kitty to amaze old Amos Short Ribs.

Arthur remembers a story similar to Good Stab’s about becoming what he eats, “some ancient lay or another I read, complete with justice and chivalry, but can no longer conjure the precise details of.” Naturally, I had to hunt for narratives about the consequences of overconsumption. It’s not surprisingly a common theme in world myth and folklore. As far as “ancient lays” go, there’s the Saga of Hrolf Kraki, which goes back at least to the 1400s in Iceland. In it, a prince is enchanted to walk by day as a bear. When the bear-prince is killed, his pregnant lover is forced to eat his flesh. She subsequently delivers one son with elk features, another with dog features, and a third who can shape-shift into a spirit-bear during battle.

I think it’s more likely Arthur knew two other stories. The first concerns a character ironically similar to Arthur in his gluttony. Erysichthon of ancient Greek legend was a king so rapacious in his greed that he cut down a grove sacred to Demeter to build a magnificent banquet hall. The highly annoyed goddess cursed him with an insatiable hunger, to feed which he depleted his entire fortune and even sold his daughter, Mestra, into slavery. When his larder was at last empty, madness drove him to devour his own flesh until nothing remained of him. Arthur might have read a detailed account of this compulsive overeater in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VIII, Fable VII. Luckily, Arthur doesn’t have Erysichthon’s means and so can only stuff himself when parishioners bring edible offerings. He can food-obsess full-time, though, as when he brings old Amos bacon or wonders how Good Stab can be so intent on proving his monstrous nature that he doesn’t scarf down Arthur’s stew.

The second story, widespread in Native American folklore from its Algonquian origins, pertains more to Good Stab’s condition. It’s the legend of the Wendigo, a ravenous spirit associated with harsh Northern winters during which people might be driven to cannibalism, the utmost expression of insatiable greed and antisocial selfishness. Such moral failure could doom cannibals to become the monstrous incarnations of what they ate: emaciated corpses often grown to gigantic proportions, emitting a foul stench, their hearts turned to ice. Good Stab is no Wendigo in that his transformation was not due to personal greed or gluttony, certainly not to cannibalism. He does, however, accuse himself of moral failure in his killing of the beaver patriarch, all so he could have enough pelts to buy a new rifle.

And now a stranger has ridden the stage coach into town to complicate Arthur’s life, and thicken the “hump” murders subplot. Welcome to Miles City, Pinkerton man Dove, and watch your well-clad back. Weird business is afoot here.

Next week, we celebrate National Poetry Month by exploring Stoker Award nominees, starting with a set of Maxwell Gold’s cosmic horror poems on The Horror Zine.[end-mark]

The post If NOT CAT Then NOT VAMPIRE: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 4) appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts fantasy

Read an Excerpt From The Killing Spell by Shay Kauwe

In a future where language magic reigns, a young Hawaiian woman must solve a murder to clear her name.

By Shay Kauwe

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Published on April 2, 2026

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Killing Spell by Shay Kauwe, a new fantasy novel publishing with Saga Press on April 14th.

LA CITY ORDINANCE #11358

As decreed by the Los Angeles Board, all prospective Guild members of any vocation, including Caster and Smith, must pass a licensing examination in order to practice magic within city territory. The examination shall be administered in the chosen regulated language: Latin, French, Italian, or Spanish.

Regulation shall be decided upon by the Board and reviewed every three years to include any language with a history of proven merit to be considered for advancement. A language may be considered three times for regulation before being permanently disqualified.

* * *

AMENDMENT 1: Arabic has passed its second attempt at regulation and been graded exceptional due to its profound influence on global literature. The language’s proclivity toward storytelling, narration, and documentation is deemed invaluable to the study of magic. One seat has been opened on the Board for a licensed Arabic speaker of a recognized clan.

* * *

AMENDMENT 2: Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese have passed their first attempt at regulation and been graded noteworthy due to their contributions to culture and art. Cantonese and Mandarin’s effects on good fortune and Japanese’s manipulation of the human body are deemed worthy of further study. Two seats have been opened on the Board for licensed Cantonese, Mandarin, or Japanese speakers of recognized clans.

* * *

Tagalog has failed its first attempt at regulation. No amendment will be made.

Chapter 1

Kea, I need you.

I flinched at the sound of the voice in my head. Makani’s sympathetic talent of telepathy, though benign, was always unsettling, like a pinch right at the temple.

Closing my eyes, I focused on sending him a response. Your chores better be done if you’re goofing off.

Something followed me into the coop.

In a heartbeat, my irritation turned to ice-cold fear. I dropped the plastic basket of wet sheets I was holding and ran to the backyard, which overlooked the ocean. Our usually small house felt like a gigantic barrier as I sprinted across the dry grass toward the garden. The coop came into view, a ramshackle construction made of weathered wood, and one of our hens, Fiona, flopped out. She clucked disapprovingly at me; her leg twisted at a funny angle as she hobbled away.

The chalk of the ward around the entrance had been wiped off by the door, leaving a smudge of grayish residue on the wooden planks. Clearly Makani’s handiwork. I swore under my breath. I’d told him a thousand times to stop pestering the birds.

I’m scared.

There was no time to be mad. I hadn’t been expecting a fight, so I was stuck only with a leiomano in my back pocket. While relatively strong for a woman of my height, I wasn’t that strong. If something big had gotten into the shed, I had little hope of success in beating it to death.

I gently tapped the door with my left shoulder while pulling out the flattened oval club, holding it at an angle in front of me. The sheen of polished wood and sharp shark’s teeth looked intimidating, but it wasn’t a hunting weapon. In the shed, I wouldn’t have the space to move freely or build power into a good swing. I’d need to get it, whatever it was, out.

The door cracked open a hair’s width, and I peered inside. A pair of hazel eyes stared back at me from my cousin jammed under the birds’ perch. Feathers, blood, and dead chickens lay everywhere. A low, guttural hiss emerged from the darkness, irritated by the thin stream of light I had let in. The air, speckled with dust and fluttering pieces of stray hay, was heavy and hot.

Makani’s chest rose and fell with quiet, strangled breaths. He squeezed his eyes shut and shot me a message.

It’s behind the door.

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The Killing Spell

Shay Kauwe

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Shay Kauwe

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Not daring to startle the thing, I twisted my head to look at the spaces between the bolts and spied a patch of scales hidden in the shadows. Stretching from the frame of the door to the wall, the creature was too large to be any normal animal. It had to be a magi.

The hissing stopped as the beast shuffled. I lost sight of it and became acutely aware of the blood rushing through my veins. Tensing my muscles, I leaned closer to the door, desperate to figure out what kind of magi it was.

A black iris flashed in the empty space, narrowing in on me, and the hissing turned to a growl. I sent Makani back a single command.

Move!

He crawled from his hiding place just as the magi lunged for him. I slammed my shoulder into the door as hard as I could, sending the beast squealing as it was knocked against the back shelves. Makani screamed. He squirmed forward on his stomach to the side of the perch that was protected by a metal grate. The magi’s head swiveled to focus on his retreating figure.

“Hey, ugly!” I shouted, stomping my feet to attract its attention.

The beast snarled, stepping into the light from the open door. A mo‘o. About five feet long, the lizard creature had sharp teeth made for rending meat, and smooth scales covered its entire body in a sickly Granny-Smith green that faded to pale white around its lower belly.

Just a baby one. I could take care of it.

Figuring my forearm would hurt less, I dragged the sharpest tooth of the leiomano down the front of my arm, wincing as I pressed in deeper to scratch up the skin. A trickle of blood welled to the surface and dripped down in a thin line.

The mo‘o raised its head so that its bulging, white neck flared like a balloon. It sniffed the air. Once its beady black eyes found the source of blood, it stilled and turned its undivided attention onto me. Good boy.

Magi might be born from magic, but ultimately, they were just animals. They couldn’t reason or use logic the way a person could. No talking dragons, or singing unicorns, or any of those other stupid stories you read about in fantasy books from before the Flood. Magi were dangerous but dumb.

I turned my back to it and ran.

Feral instinct took over as the magi smelled blood on my retreating figure. Prey. Hunt. Food. It rushed after me.

Running down the hill toward the beach wouldn’t work as my blood would likely attract more creepy-crawlies from the water, so the front of our property was the best bet. My bare feet slammed against the dry grass as I lured it to the front lawn, but I wasn’t fast enough. The mo‘o was on my heels. My palms got sweaty around the wooden handle of the leiomano, and I swore to arm myself better next time I did the laundry.

Waving my arms wildly to keep the mo‘o from ascending the back stairs onto the porch, I ran parallel to the rickety frame of our house. As I rounded the corner, I banged on the walls to make noise, releasing a shower of chipped dry paint in my wake. Sun-bleached flakes rained down around me, filling the air with the dissipating scent of sour milk. It worked. The mo‘o slithered in my direction with its mouth wide open, ready to chomp down as we made it to the front lawn. If it sunk its teeth into me, I’d get a nasty cut. But we didn’t have any money lying around for stitches, so I wasn’t looking to take chances. I’d have to cast something. My jaw locked as I planted my feet and pivoted to face the mo‘o. Breathing deeply, I ran through a list of words I could use that could make this damn thing stop moving.

Russian could work. It was simple and effective when there was an obvious target and I didn’t need to bother with definite articles, but I needed a word that rhymed with begat. Maybe run was the wrong idea though. Did lizards really run? At eight feet away, it certainly felt like it.

Scratch Russian. I didn’t have time to figure out a rhyme to make the spell work. My other trusty language, English, was always a no-go on the fly. Any attempt on my end to be poetical fell flat no matter how many Shakespearean arts, thous, or foes I threw in, even though it was an established fact that a good sonnet would work wonders. Emphasis there on good.

Hawaiian it had to be.

Six feet away now, the mo‘o crawled closer, a furious pace infecting its approach. Five feet. Hawaiian was so vague though. A simple stop might work, but it also might stop all the internal organs in both my body and the mo‘o’s from functioning. Only four feet left. Three. There was no time.

Keeping eye contact with the beast, I crouched low and dug my fingers into the lawn, entwining brittle blades of grass in my grip. With my other hand I dropped the leiomano flat to the ground and pressed hard on top of it for balance. The mo‘o was nearly right in front of me, its breath warming the air so close that I could feel the heat on my nose.

Reaching for the mana from my core, I said the first word that came to mind. “E ho‘opa‘a.” Stick.

Magic surged out of my hands and into the ground around us, rising up like a sudden breeze from the dirt. The lizard stopped moving. It writhed, tossing itself back and forth, but its efforts to escape were futile. My spell kept its legs glued firmly to the earth around it.

I breathed out a sigh of relief.

One-word spells weren’t supposed to work, but they always had for me. Sort of. They had an effect, that was enough. Call it a quirk of my mana, an unexpected benefit to being absolute crap at all other kinds of magic. I tried to lift my left hand off the leiomano so that I could finish the job and found that my spell had worked a little too well. I was also firmly stuck to the ground.

Dammit.

I really should have stopped using one-word castings years ago, but when in a pinch, I had a bad habit of saying whatever popped into my head. The joke was on me, though, since they rarely worked how I wanted them to.

The mo‘o spat at me, struggling against my magic’s hold as I strained my neck toward the house. “Sisi!” I could hear the TV blaring inside. Giving it a minute, I baked in the afternoon heat, three feet away from a floundering giant lizard. “Sicilia!” I yelled again, louder. The screen door on our porch swung open and Sisi, my teenage sister, appeared. Her hands were on her hips, and there was an irritated crease carved through the sun-freckled skin of her forehead. With Sicilia’s light-brown waves and emerald-green eyes, people usually did a double take when I explained that we were related, though I never really understood why. She and I looked a lot alike.

We both had deep-set, almond eyes that turned down slightly at the ends, wide, flat noses, and full lips. Our features were nearly identical, but we were different in our coloring. While Sisi was fair, I had brown everything. Brown skin, brown hair, and dark-brown eyes that could only be described as penetrating.

Sicilia was chewing a piece of bubble gum, apparently oblivious to the spitting mo‘o on our lawn.

“A little help?” I asked.

The gum snapped in her mouth, and she shot a disdainful glance at the magi. “What am I supposed to do about that?”

“Kill it,” I explained through gritted teeth, trying not to let my irritation bubble out.

Sisi’s gaze fell on the weapon below my left hand. “You do it.” “I can’t,” I stressed.

Sicilia’s hair was wound into a lazy topknot that spilled precariously to the side. The tita bun was a nice complement to her attitude. “Doesn’t look like that to me.”

I didn’t have the patience for this. “I’d love to take care of this myself, but I cast something and if I release the smithing, I’ll end up unsticking the mo‘o too. I’d be right back where I started.”

To emphasize how bad that would be, the mo‘o made a snarling noise and gnashed its teeth together, trying to lunge forward. Its feet didn’t budge, but the beast did spit some of its saliva onto my cheek, making me recoil. Unfortunately, my spell held tight, and the only thing I could manage to do was jerk my head back a few inches. Gross. My magic had a track record of fighting against every good intention I threw at it. At ten, I’d tried a common Latin spell to find my grandmother’s lost keys and ended up with every pin, screw, and nail in the house flying at my face. I quickly learned that the only way to tame my magic into doing what I wanted was by using spells I’d smithed myself, but that took time, patience, and talent. Sadly, I was in short supply of all three.

Sicilia gave an exaggerated sigh. “Let me get my crossbow. I’m not getting lizard guts all over my favorite shorts.” The screen door slammed shut and I was left alone.

Excerpted from The Killing Spell by Shay Kauwe. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted by permission of Saga Press at Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Excerpts Young Adult

Read an Excerpt From The Labyrinth of Waking Dreams by Michelle Kulwicki

Three teens discover a gateway to a mythical Labyrinth in the Appalachian Mountains.

By Michelle Kulwicki

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Published on April 1, 2026

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Labyrinth of Waking Dreams by Michelle Kulwicki, a young adult portal fantasy publishing with Page Street YA on April 21st.

CHAPTER 1

OLIVER

BARREN’S PEAK, WEST VIRGINIA

Oliver White crouched down in the thick weeds at the edge of the forest and took a deep breath of death.

His satchel fell to the ground with a thump. The flower looked innocent enough with bright pink petals surrounding a velvety stamen, but as he reached forward, it shied away, curling in on itself and releasing another puff of rancid-meat scent.

Oliver’s heart quickened in his chest, and he sank back on his haunches, silently reaching for the camera around his neck and pulling it to his face.

Through the specialized lens—one he’d spent months tracking down across all of Nevada—the innocence was lost. Perched in the center of the plant was a small creature the size of his thumb tip. Its black carapace shone in the beating sunlight. Two wings extended from its back, both razor sharp, both shimmering with leftover pollen. And as its head swung to regard Oliver, its tiny mandible opened, revealing a mouth full of glittering fangs.

A death weevil. Or, as Oliver had taken to not-so-affectionately calling them when they infested his rooms one spring at Sanctuary—a fucking asshole. It may be perfectly happy within the petals of the flower right now, but there was one thing death weevils liked more than high-summer pollen.

Blood.

Oliver frowned and let out a breath slowly, trying his hardest not to move. Even though the weevil had already set its sights on his face, he didn’t need to taunt it further. Not before getting a picture. Not before proving to himself that he wasn’t hallucinating. Again.

His finger found the trigger by instinct more than actual expertise. He carefully depressed the old lever, trying his hardest to coax it into clicking without activating the grinding sound of a centuries-old camera. The shutter closed. The shutter opened.

And the camera let out a low groan of anguish, before it unleashed a heavy belch of thick black smoke.

Swearing, Oliver pressed it to his face harder, trying to keep his eyes on the flower through the clog of smoke.

The weevil was gone.

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The Labyrinth of Waking Dreams

Michelle Kulwicki

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The Labyrinth of Waking Dreams

Michelle Kulwicki

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He swung the camera around, peering at the surrounding woods through the small peephole.

A bright pain exploded in his forearm, and Oliver yelped, dropping the camera so hard the strap jerked, burning the back of his neck. He gritted his teeth as the gnawing agony in his arm grew worse, barely keeping himself from smacking his other hand against the spot. (Years of fending the asshole bugs off had taught him that a swat would only push it deeper and piss it off even more.)

“Why?” he hissed to himself, rifling through his satchel that was still on the ground and coming up with a small vial. He brought it to his mouth, yanked the cork out with his teeth, and doused his arm in a homebrew of vinegar, 192-proof alcohol, and enough lavender oil to make his nostrils burn and his stomach roil.

The burrowing pain immediately stopped, but the burn from the solution was almost as bad. Oliver scrubbed his arm raw, grinding his molars against a groan of pain. “I finally get a sign, and it’s one of you assholes.” He upended the last of the vial over his arm. “Serves you right,” he chastised the monster. The weevil fell to the ground, paralyzed by the lavender, but blood kept bubbling up from the wound, droplets falling to the grass. The bite was dime sized, and due to the weevil’s special kind of poison, it wouldn’t start clotting for days. He’d be stuck wrapping his arm in gauze near constantly and probably bleeding through his sweater a dozen times while he waited for it to finally close, which absolutely sucked because it was his favorite sweater. What were the odds that he found more cashmere wadded in the bottom of a thrift store dollar bin?

Low.

As the sting from the solution finally lessened and the ringing of his heartbeat in his ears faded, Oliver knelt down over his bag again and pulled out a couple of rags. He carefully wrapped the empty vial in one and tucked it safely back in a pocket of the satchel. The other he wrapped around his forearm, yanking tight around the wound that was still pumping enough blood that he could smell the metallic scent of it over the rancid burn of the lavender. He reached for the camera again, intent on finding the thing’s body through the lens and making sure it was well and truly dead, but froze as his naked gaze landed at his feet.

The tiny corpse of the death weevil lay smoking, sharp wings crumbling to ash in front of his eyes, shiny black carapace breaking apart.

Oliver’s stomach dropped out of his body entirely.

“No way,” he whispered, sinking back down to his haunches and reaching for a long blade of grass. Dead, the weevil posed no danger to him, as long as he avoided the dripping venom of its burrowing fangs, but he still wasn’t going to touch it barehanded. He poked at the body with the stalk, rolling it over. The bottom thorax completely fell off as it crumbled to a pile of dust. Oliver blinked and swallowed heavily. The trees of the forest moaned as the wind picked up and branches creaked overhead.

He’d spent a solid year searching for the camera around his neck, locating it only by trading far more information than he should have to a Redditor named ENTSFOREVER81—someone with both a desperate desire to real-life cosplay a magic user and way too much time on their hands. Still, despite their fanatical obsession with fake wizards, they’d provided solid information. To most, it looked like a plain old vintage camera—a plastic box with bright silver dials, requiring stupidly overpriced film for which hipsters were all too willing to shell out. Only a select few would realize that the lens was different. Wrong. Concave instead of convex, a swirl of color in the center that shimmered like a mirage if you looked too closely.

It revealed monsters if you looked through the viewfinder. Monsters that shouldn’t exist on Earth. Monsters that Oliver had been tracking for over two years, ever since…

He shook his head, scowling. Even the smallest thought of Sanctuary was enough to set him twitching, enough for fiery anger to burn through his veins even hotter than the weevil’s bite. But that didn’t matter.

What did matter was that the weevil’s corpse lay at his feet, blowing away in the gusty wind… and that he could see it with no help from the camera at all.

Monsters were secret things, rare on Earth, only found in the dark of night and the nightmares of small children. But if he was seeing one with his naked eyes?

“Labyrinth,” Oliver whispered, a word that was stolen by the wind as quickly as the weevil’s corpse.

What did matter was that the barrier was breaking. And magicians wouldn’t be far behind.

Excerpted from The Labyrinth of Waking Dreams, copyright © 2026 by Michelle Kulwicki.

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Books worldbuilding

Seven Plot-Friendly Ways to Spur Societal Collapse

History can teach us the most exciting ways to destroy fictional civilizations…

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on April 1, 2026

“Fire of Troy” by Kerstiaen de Keuninck

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“Fire of Troy” by Kerstiaen de Keuninck

I’ve recently gone down a rabbit hole, obsessively reading and watching works about the Late Bronze Age Collapse: a time when civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East suffered a near simultaneous implosion. Governments fell, trade networks collapsed, and some cultures lost writing¹. Why did this happen? Ask that and you may go down the rabbit hole too.

Historian and archaeologist Eric H. Cline thinks he knows why this happened, and also how to avoid it. In a recent video, “1177 BC: The vanishing of the first globalized world,” he lists seven pointers for cultures who want to avoid social collapse. I guess that’s fine for people who have become accustomed to enjoying regular meals, living in unburned homes, and not being stabbed to death by rampaging Sea People. You know, squares.

But if you’re an author, you may look at that list and wonder if it could be a plot generator. Societal collapse can make for interesting reading! Aren’t we here for that?

All we need to do is imagine societies that do the exact opposite of the strategies Cline suggests. You might not get a full-blown apocalypse—life might even improve, at least for some—but the results cannot help but be entertaining.

Cline’s list:

1. Have multiple contingency plans
2. Cultivate resilience to invasion
3. Be self-sufficient without alienating allies
4. Be innovative and inventive
5. Prepare for extreme weather
6. Have a secure water supply
7. Keep the working class happy

The AntiCline list is the above, with the word “Don’t” appended to the beginning of each sentence. It’s astonishingly easy to come up with examples for each².

DON’T have multiple contingency plans

One fictional example of a society that needed at least one more contingency plan than it actually had is the America of Michael Swanwick’s In the Drift. The Three Mile Island event spreads radioactive fallout across the Eastern Seaboard. Cities are abandoned and the US fragments. Recovery takes decades. Not fun, but very plot-friendly.

DON’T cultivate resilience to invasion

The nations of the world are understandably ill-prepared to resist aerial invasions in H.G. Wells’ The War in the Air, since aeronautical warfare is an entirely novel development. To make matters far worse, in the course of the novel it turns out that air forces are easy to produce and impossible to defend against… with the unpleasant catch that air forces cannot occupy, only destroy. Result: the end of civilization as we know it.

DON’T be self-sufficient without alienating allies

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, interstellar travel is dependent on Spice, a drug with a single known source, the planet Arrakis. As one does when supply disruptions could kneecap the galactic civilization, the empire has not only not developed substitutes for Spice, they’ve spent centuries brutalizing Arrakis’ Fremen, laying the foundation for some suitably charismatic visionary to use imperial dependence on Spice against the empire.

DON’T be innovative and inventive

In H. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, only Styphon’s priests know how to make black gunpowder. They’ve used this closely guarded secret to make themselves the power brokers of an alternate North America. Efforts to reverse engineer gunpowder are presumably strongly discouraged. This very sensible approach has at least one significant flaw, which is that as soon as someone—a cunning alchemist, a disgruntled priest, a Pennsylvania cop accidentally dragged across timelines—reveals the secret, Styphon’s international order rapidly implodes³.

DON’T prepare for extreme weather

Kate Wilhelm’s Juniper Time is shaped by a development for which no government appears to have made sufficient plans. The entire planet is gripped by massive drought. The cause is unclear but no nation escapes the disruptive effects: famine, mass migration, societal disruption, and collapse (at least on local levels).

DON’T Have a secure water supply

In Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the Earth is (rather implausibly) dependent on lunar farms, which are in turn dependent on lunar ice mines. The problem is lunar ice is very much a non-renewable resource whose limits are fast being reached. The solution on which those running the Moon have landed is to ignore the problem. Result: the collapse of the old lunar order as desperate Lunarians finally rise up.

DON’T keep the working class happy

African American slaves in Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain are unpaid, abused, and terrorized. The slavers’ intent is to keep slaves too cowed to object. The result is a population highly motivated to rise up and drive out their oppressors, should the opportunity ever present itself. Thanks to Harriet Tubman⁴, the successful raid on Harper’s Ferry provides that opportunity. Result: not only does independent Nova Africa replace the slave states, and not only is the USA itself ultimately overthrown, but the imperialist world order itself collapses in the aftermath.

Admittedly, all that is good for the people at the bottom, which is to say the vast majority of the human species, but I imagine people like Cecil Rhodes, Lorrin A. Thurston, and King Leopold II died angry. …Also a good result.

The above seven are just a few of the possibilities offered by cultural AntiClines⁵. SFF abounds with examples I could have used. The odds are very good that I’ve missed your favourites. Comments are below.[end-mark]

1. Writing would have been practiced largely by castes of scribes, castes dependent on government and commercial support. ︎
2. The obvious option is to list five works set during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. There are least two very famous works, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Even with a very generous definition of five, two is not five. So I think I’ll go with seven current examples. How hard could that be? Later: not hard. ︎
3. “But surely removing priestly boots from the necks of violent, highly competitive aristocrats is a good thing?” you ask. Styphon was motivated to keep conflicts going to ensure demand for gunpowder. At the same time, they needed to keep conflicts low-level, as apocalypse tends to undermine demand. How sure can we be that what followed the fall of Styphon’s international order wasn’t a recapitulation of the Thirty Years War? ︎
4. “But what of John Brown?” you ask. He gets a lot of credit for what is actually Tubman’s strategic and tactical insight. The lesson here is ambitious men should be mindful for opportunities to upstage brilliant women. ︎
5. Remember to CamelCase or geologists will get confused. ︎

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News Talamasca: The Secret Order

AMC Cancels Talamasca: The Secret Order After One Season

I wanted to believe?

By Molly Templeton

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Published on March 30, 2026

Screenshot: AMC

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Screenshot: AMC

Perhaps the vampires and witches will sleep better at night knowing there’s no arcane organization keeping tabs on them. Variety reports that AMC has canceled Talamasca: The Secret Order, making it the first show in the Anne Rice Immortal Universe to prove to be mortal after all.

In a statement, AMC said, “The Talamasca has a storied place within the Anne Rice Immortal Universe, and we expect to see at least some of these characters, and the organization itself, in future expressions of the franchise.”

Talamasca pulled from both the Interview With the Vampire and Mayfair Witches stories (both of those shows will return for third seasons, with Interview being re-branded as The Vampire Lestat in June, and Mayfair next year). The series starred Guy Denton as a law student recruited to join the secretive titular organization, which monitors the supernatural world. The logline said, “When Guy learns that the Talamasca has been tracking him since his childhood, he falls headlong into a world of secret agents and immortal beings who, up to now, have maintained a fragile balance with the mortal world.”

Denton’s co-stars included Elizabeth McGovern, William Fichtner, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, and Celine Buckens, with Jason Schwartzman appearing as a vampiric guest star, and Eric Bogosian and Justin Kirk appearing as their Interview characters.

The series had a somewhat odd creative team in developer and co-showrunner John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side) and co-showrunner Mark Lafferty (a producer on The Right Stuff and Halt and Catch Fire). Reviews were all over the place: The AV Club gave it a B+, while Vulture scoffed, “Where Interview With the Vampire is ambitious, Talamasca is brand management.”

You can watch the six-episode single season of Talamasca on AMC+.[end-mark]

The post AMC Cancels <i>Talamasca: The Secret Order</i> After One Season appeared first on Reactor.

Books SFF Bestiary

Warrior Ethos, Cat Style: Erin Hunter’s Warriors: Into the Wild

A fantasy adventure series for cat-lovers of all ages…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on March 30, 2026

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Western culture loves stories about leaving civilization behind and returning to the free life of the wild. It especially loves them when the protagonists are animals. Often it’s feral descendants of domestic species, such as Spirit and the Silver Brumby. Equally often it’s a domestic animal who goes wild.

That’s the trope that the creative team collectively known as Erin Hunter has turned into an entire and expanding industry. It starts here, with Into the Wild. Orange kitten Rusty lives a comfortable life as a pet, but he dreams of hunting real mice. One day, that dream comes true.

I love cats. I have three at the moment. I had trouble getting into the book at first because I have Very Large Feels about the life that real feral cats live. All of mine come from feral colonies, and two were born there.

Also, the myth that That Visit to the vet turns a cat into a potato. Will someone please convince my cats of this? They won’t listen to me. The tortie is hanging from a curtain rod because there’s a bird on the roof, the calico is running kitty parkour from one end of the house to the other, and senior cat, she of the black ears and tail and the I Dream of Jeannie eyes, who rules all, is rehearsing her latest interpretive dance on top of one of the cat trees.

But I quickly found my way in. The characters captured me, and the swiftly paced action. The worldbuilding is careful and detailed.

A lot of thought has gone into it, and it shows. It reads to me as fantasy, and I am a fantasy fan. Fantasy I can do, even if I have Too Many Feels about the reality behind it.

The characters are classic talking animals. They have human-level intelligence and reasoning powers, and they converse in what translates as English. At the same time, they’re definitely cats. Their body language is cat language. They meow and purr and yowl and hiss in true cat fashion.

The cat colonies in the book are divided into Clans. Rusty, who is renamed Firepaw, is recruited into ThunderClan. There are three other Clans in the area: WindClan, RiverClan, and the ominously named ShadowClan. Each Clan has a leader and a deputy, and controls its own area with defined boundaries.

Within those boundaries, the colony consists of warriors of both sexes and their apprentices, who patrol and defend the Clan and do the hunting, queens with kits who are closely guarded in the heart of the colony and are fed and cared for by the rest of the Clan, elders who are retired but still valued for their wisdom and experience, and one or more medicine cats who looks after the health and welfare of the colony. The medicine cat, also called a shaman, is well versed in herb-lore and healing. They know which herbs to prescribe for various ailments, and they treat open wounds with cobwebs, a bit of lore that’s particularly useful for the warriors.

The leader of the Clan is divinely appointed and divinely inspired. When one is chosen, they make a pilgrimage to a place that is sacred to all the Clans, to the Moonstone, to present themselves to StarClan. StarClan, which is basically the gods of the cats, endows the leader with nine lives and gives them dreams that will guide them as they return to their own Clan.

The Clans do not mingle except once a month at the full moon, when they gather in a specific place and share news and negotiate various matters. They defend their territories fiercely, and not just because they’re a territorial species. Resources are limited and under constant threat from human encroachment. They do what they have to in order to survive.

That means, as the story unfolds, that one Clan has started invading other territories. Its own territory is depleted, its population is declining, and its leadership has changed for the worse. When it threatens ThunderClan, Firepaw and his friends have no choice but to fight back.

Enemies from without are not the only danger ThunderClan faces. There’s treachery within, and Firepaw is right in the middle of it. He’s an adopted member of the Clan; he has to earn its trust.

It doesn’t help that he was raised by humans. The Clans are contemptuous of what they call kittypets. Soft, weak, uneducated in the ways of the Clans, unable to live in the wild—they’re no match for Clan warriors.

But ThunderClan, though not struggling as hard as ShadowClan, is teetering on the edge. It needs warriors. Firepaw is young, strong, and has escaped just in time to avoid That Visit to the vet. He has a lot to learn but he’s willing, and he’s never really tempted to go back to the domesticated life.

He’s a fated hero. This first volume doesn’t push it too hard, but the signs are there. He has prophetic dreams. He notices things that others miss, and he’s often there when important things happen. He’s drawn to the medicine cats and they to him, and powerful and significant figures take note of him. The leader of the Clan becomes his mentor and trains him to be a warrior. It’s clear he’s meant for great things.

This is marketed as a middle-grade series, but this adult reader finds it quite satisfactory, both as a fantasy and as an adventure. It doesn’t read as overly simplified. There’s no talking down.

In fact there’s a fair bit of subtlety to it. Limited resources, war and invasion, political maneuvering both positive and negative, are very much a part of the fabric of the world. We aren’t lectured to, we aren’t fed Messages. It’s baked in, and it works on multiple levels. It has a lot to say about things that humans are concerned with, too.

And it’s cats. Fantasy cats, not quite real, but my belief suspended itself willingly after all, and the story pulled me along to the end and beyond. There is closure in this volume, and problems resolved, but there’s considerably more to come.[end-mark]

The post Warrior Ethos, Cat Style: Erin Hunter’s <i>Warriors: Into the Wild</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Horror

Read an Excerpt From These Familiar Walls by C.J. Dotson

Preteen Amber ignores her family’s misgivings when she befriends the troubled new kid in the neighborhood…

By C.J. Dotson

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Published on March 31, 2026

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from These Familiar Walls by C.J. Dotson, a suburban horror novel publishing with St. Martin’s Press on April 14th.

A Secret Place

May 2020

Amber made her way to the room off the hall to the garage, formerly her and Hannah’s playroom, where she’d had the movers leave her home office supplies. As Ben called the kids to lunch, Amber shut and locked the door. She turned, letting her gaze wander. If she set her desk in the corner under the window, filing cabinet and printer in arm’s reach, the room would still be half empty. Maybe she could get a small sofa, and the built-in shelves were perfect for jigsaw puzzles and books.

The movers had left the furniture along the wall farthest from the window, and boxes filled the middle of the room. Amber shifted the cardboard stacks out of the way. When she lifted the last box, the contents within slid with a series of soft clack-clacks. Opening that one first, she found a surprising number of candles, a handful of trinkets, a little green lighter, and a small decorative mirror with an oversized, ornate frame.

Amber had no plan for these things, but it might be nice to arrange them on the built-in shelves, at least until she had a better idea. She started with a candle, a vanilla-scented pillar of creamy off-white. She set it on the shelf, scooped the lighter out of the box, and lit the wick. The soothing glow heightened the relaxation of this much-needed alone time. Amber let her gaze linger for a moment on the small flame.

Next, she pulled the little mirror from the box. As she turned, an impression of motion in her peripheral vision made her pause. She glanced back down at the glass, and when she blinked—was her reflection slower to open its eyes than she’d been? The impression left as fast as it had come, and she saw nothing more than her face, tired and small in the overwrought frame.

Come to think of it, Amber didn’t actually like that mirror much. Rather than prop it up next to the candle, she set it to one side, face down.

The next candle came in a glass jar, dark green, with three wicks. She set it next to the first, began to turn away, then paused and picked up the lighter. Eyeing her desk, considering whether she could lift it or if she’d have to drag it across the carpet, Amber touched the flame to each wick. Artificial pine scent mingled with the vanilla.

Lifting the desk proved possible, if strenuous. Amber walked it halfway across the small space before she set it down, leaned over, and pulled another candle from the box. This one was pink, in a holder with beads on it, and she lit it as well and set it with the others before she finished moving her desk. Everything would be right where she wanted it. When had she last felt this content? On her way back across the room, she stopped to fish out another candle, bright red and never burned. She lit it and set it down. A handful of tealights followed. Her wheeled office chair rolled easily to the desk. She put a sculpted-wax sea turtle candle on the shelf, one she’d had for so long she didn’t remember getting it, and lit the wick. Like the desk, the filing cabinet was too heavy to move in one go. That was okay, Amber didn’t have to rush. While she paused, she lit two more candles. A smooth, shiny wax sphere in swirling, glittering shades of brown came next, but the shelf was too full. That candle went onto the next one up. She set another simple pillar next to it and lit them both. Three more tealights fit in one hand. Two thin candles in old fashioned holders went one on each end.

Time to start unpacking the office supplies. First, Amber reached into the box of decorations again. She felt around, paused, and glanced in at a clutter of odds and ends. She pushed aside a framed photo of her wedding day and moved a clumsy, handmade mug from Xander. No more candles.

Irritation marred Amber’s relaxation. She wanted to light another candle. The annoyance gave way to perplexity. Wasn’t it strange that she’d run out? Hadn’t she just been surprised by the number of candles in this box?

Amber turned to the shelves and her last scrap of soothing calm melted away.

Nearly twenty candles flickered there, the flames small but numerous enough that the room had grown warm. The tall ones singed blackening spots onto the bottom of the shelf above them. Grimacing, Amber leaned forward and blew them all out. Ribbons of smoke drifted up from the wicks and Amber stared, her mind moving slowly.

Why had she lit that many candles?

She retraced her actions and shook her head. The furniture was arranged how she wanted it, she’d been working until the moment before, but the details were fuzzy. Strange.

“I’m tired,” she told herself, surprised by the rasp in her voice. “It’s been a long couple days and I just had a… a weird blank moment.”

The wicks left the room vaguely smoky, a scent that brought Nathan Teldegardo to mind, as he’d been the summer they’d met. A smell of smoke had always hung around him, sometimes faint but never missing.

All the tension she’d banished while setting up her office crawled back up her spine, across her shoulders. Her one relaxing moment, spoiled. She wasn’t ready to go out again and put all the priority back on her role of parent and wife, but it was either that or keep working in the too-hot room, trying to ignore her unease and the hint of smoke.

Rubbing her temples, Amber went out to face the rest of the day with a hesitant stride.

From These Familiar Walls by C. J. Dotson. Copyright © 2026 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

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These Familiar Walls

C.J. Dotson

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Movies & TV The Blue Trail

The Blue Trail Examines Aging Amidst an Ageist Dystopia

A thoughtfully-paced treatise on age, freedom, and self-discovery.

By Reuben Baron

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Published on April 2, 2026

Image: Vitrine Filmes

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Image: Vitrine Filmes

We finally found it: the one near-future dystopia premise that viewers in the United States can safely watch in 2026 and say with at least 80% confidence and relief, “That’s not gonna happen here any time soon.” In the sci-fi Brazil of Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail (a winner of multiple awards at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival), all senior citizens aged 75 and older are taken away from their homes—by force in the “wrinkle wagon,” if necessary—and sent to spend the rest of their lives in a “Colony” from which no one returns. What happens in the Colony is left to our imaginations, but from the humiliating and darkly comic travel preparations we’re shown, it doesn’t seem like anyone’s looking forward to the trip (I choose to imagine it as the Near Death Star from Futurama).

I couldn’t tell you how plausible this scenario is from a Brazilian perspective. I can tell you that, given how much of the leadership in both of the United States’ major political parties would be past due for this forced retirement, this particular situation is probably unimaginable here… except, perhaps, as a “revenge of the youth” against said leadership gone horribly wrong… or maybe if there was a clearer class double standard of power for the elderly rich and punishment for the elderly poor (which is already implied if not fully explored in The Blue Trail, with its plot points about elderly characters working to purchasing their freedom)… Look, we can’t predict anything with complete certainty, but unlike 99% of dystopian movies, I at least wasn’t watching this one filled with anxiety about its relatability to the present!

The film’s protagonist, Tereza (Denise Weinberg), is 77 years old and still working at an alligator meat processing plant when the forced retirement age drops from 80 to 75. She’s presented with a medal recognizing her “national living heritage” while being given a deadline to leave for the Colony. With the time she has left, her last wish is to fly in an airplane for the first time in her life. However, buying a commercial airline ticket requires permissions her daughter and conservator (Clarissa Pinheiro) refuses to grant her—so Tereza sneaks onto a boat heading up the Amazon River towards Itacoatiora, where private pilots conduct their own illegal flights.

At first, one might assume the title The Blue Trail is a description of the Amazon River itself. While Tereza is traveling with the boat captain Cadu (Rodrigo Santoro), a different sort of “blue trail” gets introduced—the “drool” of a snail that, when dropped into one’s eyes like eyedrops, makes you hallucinate visions of your future. This is the first of a few points where The Blue Trail shifts from grounded realistic social science fiction into a more fanciful sort of magical realism. Cadu’s trip on the snail drool leaves him unable to steer his ship, and Tereza proves adept at taking over the responsibility—two Chekov’s guns ready to go off later in the film.

With its beautiful imagery (the Amazon rainforest makes a gorgeous backdrop for Guillermo Garza’s carefully composed cinematography) and gently quirky music (courtesy of Memo Guerra), The Blue Trail play out as a more relaxing experience than you’d expect from a film about going on the lam in the dystopian future. Truth be told, it might be too relaxing. There were some points in the middle of the film where I struggled a bit to stay awake, and based on other reactions after my screening, I don’t think it was just me. The pacing is on the slow side, and the picaresque storytelling gets meandering. I love the energy Weinberg brings to Tereza, but when she’s bouncing between episodes with different co-stars, it sometimes feels like the character’s personal journey gets lost.

I found myself connecting more with the film once Roberta (Miriam Socarrás) entered the picture, becoming Tereza’s companion and by far the feature’s most interesting supporting character. An atheist who makes a living posing as a nun and selling digital Bible tablets from her houseboat, Roberta was able to buy herself freedom and prizes it above all else. The friendship between the two strong-willed septuagenarians becomes passionate and, at times, physically intimate; it’s not much of a stretch to view their connection as the much-fabled “old woman yuri.”

The movie’s climax, set at a casino where Tereza bets everything she can for her own freedom, brings in more of the magical realist and psychedelic elements to strange and captivating effect. I dare not spoil the casino’s big game, but it had me asking “What am I watching?” both in terms of the weirdness of the event itself and in terms of what filmmaking tricks were employed to present it. The place where the film cuts off before the credits feels a little bit sudden, and I can’t say for sure whether I fully “got” the purpose of such abruptness on this viewing, but thinking on it, the final images do leave a solid enough emotional impression.

The Blue Trail finds evocative ways to get across the horrors of its world—planes flying ironic statements of how “The future belongs to everyone,” graffiti messages pleading to reunite with grandparents—while keeping to its own chill rhythms as a warm story of self-discovery. While the setting could be fleshed out in greater detail, and some questions remain about the believability of the central conceit, it succeeds in presenting emotional truths about struggles of age discrimination and raising thoughtful questions about potential endpoints to capitalism’s obsession with “productivity.” As senior citizen adventure films go, I personally preferred the more down-to-Earth yet also more exciting Thelma from a few years ago, but I’m glad I saw The Blue Trail. If you’re in the right frame of mind for something slow and a little strange, Mascaro knows how to take you on a trip.[end-mark]

The post <i>The Blue Trail</i> Examines Aging Amidst an Ageist Dystopia appeared first on Reactor.

News What to Watch

What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Bask in the Glory of The Mummy Returns and Early 2000s CGI The Rock

Plus: Sled dog racer Blair Braverman says goodbye

By Molly Templeton

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Published on March 27, 2026

Image: Universal Pictures

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Image: Universal Pictures

I don’t generally go in for those “Well, we made it to the weekend!” sentiments, in large part because the weekend comes whether we’re waiting for it or not. But this was somehow A Week, with capital letters and everything. About once a day I think of the part in the documentary Eno where Brian Eno talks about realizing that you can’t do input and output at once. You can’t take in the news and the world and your email and whatever else while simultaneously creating your own output (whatever form that may take). Eno used to do input over breakfast, so he says he just stopped eating breakfast (and doing all the associated inputting). To which I say, well, we cannot all be Brian Eno. But sometimes, taking a break from input is a good idea. A necessary one, even.

That said, here are some things to read and watch! And one more thing you could read this weekend is a lot of protest signs, as the next No Kings protests take place Saturday, March 28th. If you can’t make it to a march, you can of course call your reps. Hug your friends, stop to admire the flowers, and catch a sunrise if you can. I swear it helps.

The Mummy Returns This Weekend! No, Not That Mummy, the Other Mummy

April showers bring … April mummies, apparently. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy skitters into theaters later this month, but first it’s nostalgia time: The Mummy Returns has one of those cheery re-releases this weekend. It is not the utter masterpiece, The Mummy, but it’s also not the third Mummy, a movie that I literally forgot existed. No, The Mummy Returns is a perfectly capable Mummy, still stars Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz and John Hannah and Oded Fehr and the rest of the gang, and, yes, it introduced moviegoers to the Rock (then still going by his wrestling name). If you have seen images from the live-action Moana, you may feel this movie needs to apologize. (You could watch Fast Five to cleanse your Rock-palate.) But still! In theaters. This weekend only. You know what to do.

The North Wind, the West Wind, the Helm Wind

Funny, I was just thinking the other week about genre, and genre boundaries, and whether it matters what genre something is, and then I read Sarah Hall’s new novel Helm, and I simply couldn’t tell you whether it “counts” as SFF or not. There’s a personified wind! Helm is a real wind in England; in Hall’s hands, Helm is a somewhat mischievous being with opinions and desires. But most of Helm is about regular people who live near Helm and Helm’s incredible clouds—people of many generations, from a tribal girl who sees a vision to a Christian priest who wishes to defeat Helm; from an early meteorologist to a modern-day scientist worrying about all the plastic in the air. Helm sees all, weaving through all these stories, and Hall writes with her usual richness—though her novels usually settle deep into the bones of a character, and this one feels almost like a series of short stories, sliced up and scattered (perhaps by a wind). Some SFF readers will love it; some will find it boring. In a slow-moving, big-scale kind of way, it’s a climate fiction novel, but like most Hall novels it is also a book about a place, richly drawn and full of characters. It leaves a curious feeling. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. Maybe you’ll read it and feel the same.

I Know You Like Dogs, and These Are Some Very Good Dogs

Would you like to get in your feelings today? Look, I can help. It just takes one article: Blair Braverman writing in the New York Times about her last journey with her sled dogs. Braverman has been writing about her dogs and her life for years—I remember following her on Twitter, before that website died and we never talked about it again, ha ha—including in the book Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North. But now she’s hanging up her sled. Her essay about it is beautiful, and heartbreaking, and absolutely full of love for her dogs (and full of great photos of said dogs). “I wasn’t a natural racer; I sought adventure more than speed,” she writes about her career. “But I had two main strengths. Like the dogs, I didn’t quit.” 

You don’t have to have ever set foot near a sled pulled by huskies to appreciate Braverman’s elegy for this part of her life. It probably helps if you’ve ever loved a dog or several, though.

Hey, Hey, Let’s Read More About/Related To/Around Sinners; Let’s Never Stop Talking About Sinners, Okay?

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners didn’t win as many Oscars as it should have, but that’s okay. It’s still the winner in my heart. (A local theater has it back on big screens again, which is also very winning.) If, like me, you cannot get enough of Sinners, here is something very cool: Black Perspectives has put together a Sinners syllabus. As the introductory text says, “This syllabus delves into the multifaceted historical, cultural, and social contexts depicted in the film, providing audiences with a deeper understanding of its layered narratives.”

The list is epic. It begins with books giving historical context about the Mississippi Delta and Jim Crow South, and then it travels through history, music, art, gender, activism, Black horror, and more, before winding up with a list of other films, music, and series to watch. You could probably spend years with this syllabus. If you have already read all the articles about Sinners, well, here you go. Lots more to read.[end-mark]

The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Bask in the Glory of <i>The Mummy Returns</i> and Early 2000s CGI The Rock appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Omen

Omen III: The Final Conflict Ended Armageddon With a Whimper

Starring a young Sam Neill, the third Omen film had the chance to be something special… and whiffed it.

By Don Kaye

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Published on March 31, 2026

Image: 20th Century Studios

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Image: 20th Century Studios

Produced for under $3 million, starring Gregory Peck and directed by a then-unknown Richard Donner, The Omen was one of the seminal horror hits of the 1970s. Riding on the coattails of films like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, as well as the bogus end-times prophecies of authors like Hal Lindsey and the burgeoning Satanic Panic hysteria, the 1976 film about the birth of the Antichrist into a wealthy political family was a tremendous hit, earning a then-staggering $61 million at the worldwide box office.

Critics at the time were cool to the film, but over the years The Omen has been reappraised as one of the more effective Hollywood horror thrillers of its era. Its success led, of course, to a sequel, and in 1978 Damien: Omen II—in which a teenaged Antichrist discovers his true identity and begins to embrace it—was released to an even harsher critical reception and less turnout at the box office, although its $46 million gross (on a budget of under $7 million) was enough to convince 20^th Century Fox to move forward with a third film, titled The Final Conflict (later renamed Omen III: The Final Conflict for home video release).

The Final Conflict, directed by Graham Baker and starring a young Sam Neill as the now-adult Damien Thorn, was released in 1981 and billed—as its title implied—as the concluding chapter in the Omen story: Damien would complete his rise and the world would fall under his thumb unless he was stopped by the forces of good (or, in this case, the second coming of Christ). Yet the film earned even less money—just over $20 million—and the critics were especially negative this time out, presumably putting an end to the series.

Producer Harvey Bernhard, the driving force behind the Omen movies, had initially envisioned a franchise that could yield as many as seven films. David Seltzer, who had penned the screenplay for the original Omen, said that while he had no interest in writing any more of the movies, he would have provided—if asked—a bible laying out ideas for another six films. But then Bernhard decided to cap the series at three movies: “We had to kill [Damien] sometime,” Bernhard says in the documentary 666: The Omen Revealed. “He had to die.”

Both The Omen and Damien: Omen II focused on a then-novel question: what if the Antichrist, only a child and unaware of his destiny, was placed into an environment—aided by helpful Satanists who manipulate themselves into key positions around him—by which he could prosper and eventually find himself holding the levers of political and economic power? And what if his unseen father assisted in clearing the path for him by cleverly killing off anyone who stood in his way through a series of bizarre, “coincidental” accidents?

This was all supposed to be part of a Biblical prophecy, found (according to the story’s mythology) in the last chapter of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation. The Antichrist would garner immense worldwide power as he readied himself for a final, apocalyptic battle with a resurrected Jesus Christ, with their confrontation either ending the world or cleansing it of evil once and for all. So one might have reasonably expected The Final Conflict to follow through with an epic, climactic clash between the devil’s son and his opposite number. But that didn’t happen, and the series ended on a desultory note in an abandoned church, rather than on the plain of Megiddo with the armies of God and Satan facing each other.

As the film opens, a 32-year-old Damien is consolidating his power: he’s now head of his family corporation, Thorn Industries, which controls the production and distribution of much of the world’s food supply. He’s also just been appointed U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, the same post his father Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) held in the first movie, following the mysterious suicide of the previous ambassador. His financial, global, and political leverage steadily growing, Damien is nonetheless haunted by signs that the second coming of Christ is imminent.

Meanwhile, seven priests, each armed with one of the Seven Deadly Daggers of Megiddo (the only weapons that can destroy Damien), make multiple attempts to assassinate him, each ending with a priest’s gruesome demise. As it becomes clear that Christ has been reborn somewhere in England, Damien musters his worldwide legion of followers—including a young boy whose journalist mother (Lisa Harrow) he’s become romantically involved with—to kill every male child born in the U.K. on the date of Christ’s rebirth, thus preventing him from ending Damien’s reign.

The first two Omen films are best remembered now for their elaborate death sequences, a gimmick later picked up by the Final Destination films. Every time someone gets close to discovering the truth about Damien, or alerting his adopted family to that truth, they get killed in an inexplicable “accident.” The first entry was famous for its stunning decapitation of a photographer played by David Warner and the impalement of a priest portrayed by one-time Doctor Who star Patrick Troughton, while the second movie featured a doctor sliced in half by an elevator cable and Lew Ayres drowning horribly under a frozen lake, among 10 or 11 others.

Halfway through the second movie, one of Satan’s minions notifies 12-year-old Damien (Jonathan Scott Taylor) of his actual lineage, a burden he first rejects but eventually comes to accept. Therein lies one of the main problems with The Final Conflict: the first film focused on the mystery of Damien’s birth, the second on whether he would come to terms with his identity, with initially disbelieving protagonists like Gregory Peck and William Holden eventually realizing he must be destroyed. In the third film, Damien is ostensibly the protagonist himself—a plot point that execs at 20^th Century Fox took issue with.

“Fox said, ‘We realized that Damien is the hero of the piece,’” recalls The Final Conflict screenwriter Andrew Birkin in the Omen Revealed doc. “’We don’t know if that can work.’” Birkin’s solution was to beef up the role of Father DeCarlo (Rossano Brazzi), the leader of the Christian hit squad that’s out to nail Damien with the Seven Deadly Daggers. This also provided the film with the opportunity to stage more of the deaths that the series was famous for, although by the third film, the macabre set pieces had lost much of their impact and inspiration—and didn’t really fit comfortably into the occult/political thriller that Birkin had penned (it doesn’t help that DeCarlo’s team is inept and outmatched every step of the way).

Even thornier (no pun intended) was the third act scenario in which Damien orders the murder of all newborn male babies in the U.K. to stop one of them from growing up to be Jesus. In an increasingly unpleasant montage, five of the killings (out of what is supposed to be a total of 31) are featured—although the filmmakers did not go as far as to show them in graphic detail. One—involving the child of one of Damien’s own henchmen (Don Gordon)—is so strangely staged (the mother has a vision of the baby as a mummy) that it almost evokes laughter.

But The Final Conflict’s most disappointing aspect is that the title bout never actually happens. In the film, the “Christ child” is safely hidden away by Father DeCarlo, who then works with Harrow’s Kate Reynolds to lure Damien to an abandoned church, where Kate can snatch her son back from the influence of the Antichrist and Father DeCarlo can stick a Deadly Dagger into him. Unfortunately, Kate’s son takes the knife instead, but Kate manages to retrieve it and stab Damien herself. He dies as a glowing image of Christ appears amidst the ruins of the church. “You have won… nothing,” Damien snarls at his nemesis as he collapses, with Biblical verses filling the screen and the music turning from ominous to triumphant.

I remember seeing this for the first time and thinking, “That’s it?” Making Damien himself the protagonist—although that’s quite different from the “hero”—gave the film a weird, off-balance structure to begin with, but then building him up only to kill him off in a ruined church, with a hologram of the adult Christ (still just a newborn at this point) projected above him, was a far cry from the apocalyptic battles, suffering of millions, and ultimate face-off between Christ and the Antichrist that the series’ prophecy foretold.

Of course, with a relatively modest budget of $6 million or so, an actual “final conflict” between the armies of good and evil was almost certainly never going to happen onscreen. In fact, 20^th Century Fox—which was going through some management upheavals at the time—refused to pay for Sam Neill’s airfare when he flew to England to audition for the role of Damien. His mentor, famed actor James Mason, covered the cost himself to help his young protégé (although Mason was apparently reimbursed). That alone perhaps says a lot about what the studio was willing to invest in the franchise at that point.

As for Sam Neill, appearing here after his breakout role in My Brilliant Career, you can almost visibly see him struggling to find the right tone for the part. At times he’s quite good: on a one-to-one basis, he can be charming, calculating, even seductive—qualities that the Antichrist might in fact deploy in order to convert people to his cause. Neill has several chilling moments as well, but in the several monologues he is given (often performed in a secret lair where he keeps a statue of Christ crucified backwards), he sounds less terrifying and more like he’s just hectoring. Part of the problem stems from what I noted earlier: is Damien supposed to be the protagonist? Are we supposed to empathize with him? And if not, who?

Overall, Neill has enough natural presence to make him watchable, while the rest of the cast is largely unmemorable. The movie’s other strong points? Graham Baker, directing his second feature film after coming up with the likes of Ridley Scott in the world of commercials, makes much of this film perhaps the most visually impressive of the series. And Jerry Goldsmith’s score—don’t forget, he won an Oscar for the first film—remains as haunting and portentous as ever.

But even if The Final Conflict had a bigger budget and the full resources of the studio behind it, portraying this ultimate Biblical battle between good and evil in truly spectacular fashion might be a difficult feat to pull off. May I present as evidence the Left Behind movies, based on a series of violent novels co-authored by evangelical minister Tim LaHaye and writer Jerry B. Jenkins. The books chronicle everything the Omen films only hinted at, including the Great Tribulation, the establishment of a new world order under the Antichrist (sending the world’s Christians into hiding), the Rapture, and the final victory of a reborn Jesus Christ.

The books led to the production of five films, of which only two were released in theaters (the rest went directly to home video): 2000’s Left Behind: The Movie, starring Kirk Cameron, and 2014’s Left Behind, with Nicolas Cage headlining. The movies were slammed by critics (both secular and Christian, it should be noted) and audiences for their shoddy production values, cheap visuals, bad acting, and incoherent scripting.

Meanwhile, 20^th Century Fox (now 20^th Century Studios) has tried to wring a few more bucks out of The Omen with only varying degrees of success. The universally panned TV movie Omen IV: The Awakening premiered on the Fox network in May 1991. Some 15 years later, the studio tried again with The Omen, a direct remake of the original film that critics called inert and pointless, although it was blessed with a worldwide gross of $120 million. Next, the more positively received 2024 prequel The First Omen ended where the original movie begins, seemingly bringing the series full circle. Perhaps the studio will one day take a chance on The Final Conflict again—and this time give Armageddon the treatment it deserves.[end-mark]

The post <i>Omen III: The Final Conflict</i> Ended Armageddon With a Whimper appeared first on Reactor.

Column 80s Fantasy Film Club

The Last Unicorn: A Fantasy Classic Whose Beauty Never Fades

Beyond simple nostalgia, this movie was a foundational part of so many childhoods…

By Tyler Dean

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Published on April 1, 2026

Credit: Rankin/Bass Productions

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Credit: Rankin/Bass Productions

In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the Eighties are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since.

For a more in-depth introduction to this series of articles, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. Last time we looked at Rankin/Bass’ chimeric cult classic of magic and science, The Flight of Dragons; this time we are looking at another (far more sublime) clash between the ancient and modern, The Last Unicorn.

Like most millennials, I saw The Last Unicorn on a rented VHS sometime in my early childhood. I wouldn’t read Peter Beagle’s original novel until college when it was recommended to me by my then-girlfriend, who adored it. By the time I was reading Beagle’s exquisite prose on a train headed from Parma to Ravenna, the cartoon was settled lore, a thing so deep in my DNA that I could not look at it quite right. It felt like a deep and foundational seam of my personality. And, judging by the responses to this film over the last forty years, it got into the bones of a whole generation. So, let’s discuss…

Based on Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 novel, the 1982 film follows the same plot, more or less. The titular Unicorn, upon learning that she is the last of her kind, sets out to find her missing kin. Along the way, she finds allies in Schmendrick the Magician and the medieval equivalent of an aging gun moll, Molly Grue; eventually they arrive in the lands of King Haggard, who has trapped the other unicorns in the sea, where they are guarded by the menacing Red Bull. To protect her from the Red Bull, Schmendrick turns the Unicorn into a human woman. Disguised as the Lady Amalthea, the last Unicorn begins to forget that she was ever an immortal being and falls in love with Haggard’s ward, Prince Lír.

Molly, Schmendrick, and Amalthea search for the location of the Red Bull and discover that it has driven all the other unicorns into the sea so that the melancholy Haggard can look upon them every day—they are the only thing that has ever made him happy, so he has hunted and hoarded them. Amalthea becomes a unicorn again and finally defeats the Bull in a desperate battle. The Unicorns are freed, Haggard and his castle tumble into the waves, and Lír bids a heartfelt farewell to the woman he loved. Molly Grue and Schmendrick ride off together into the sunset and the Unicorn returns to her woods, no longer the last of her kind, and having experienced love and regret during her time in a mortal body. The film was released in a small number of theatres, made a modest but disappointing profit and then went on to do what most Rankin/Bass productions did: finding a devoted audience on VHS and laserdisc. 

So…is The Last Unicorn any good? Does its hallowed reputation live up to the hype conjured by our collective childhood nostalgia? Yes, for the most part! It’s far from a perfect film but it has more than enough charm, pathos, humor, and style to make up for its minor shortcomings. 

Let’s talk about the bad first. The film does drag in the second half. For every incredible ten-minute vignette, there are long stretches where very little happens. There are several songs performed by the British-American rock band America that are fantastic—the soundtrack was composed and arranged by songwriting legend Jimmy Webb, and the eponymous title track is an absolute folk rock classic. There are another two songs, however—one sung by Katie Irving (performing for Mia Farrow), and a duet sung by Irving and Jeff Bridges—that are pretty terrible. Irving in particular sounds off-key, which is surprising given that she was ostensibly hired because Farrow herself could not sing. But honestly, that’s about the sum total of the movie’s shortcomings, and its high points far outweigh its weaknesses. 

A lot of credit is due to Beagle’s writing. He adapted the screenplay from his novel and is surprisingly not precious about his own work. The original novel feels deeply postmodern, constantly self-analyzing and deconstructing its own fantasy tropes. His film adaptation is played straight, to its vast credit—trusting in the power of its own mythos and preserving enough of Beagle’s purposely anachronistic humor to entertain without ever veering into self-parody. So many of Rankin and Bass’ screenplays were written by the far less talented Romeo Muller (who scripted both The Flight of Dragons and The Return of the King), and the difference in quality is painfully apparent when compared with Beagle’s work.

The cast is also phenomenal. Surprisingly stacked for a small release, it features Mia Farrow as the Unicorn, Alan Arkin as Schmendrick, Christopher Lee as Haggard, Jeff Bridgesas Lír, and Angela Lansbury as Mommy Fortuna. The real power player, however, is Tammy Grimes, who imbues Molly Grue with an energy both jaggedly tragic and pragmatically resigned. She is the emotional heart of the film and manages to be a standout even among an incredibly talented cast. Incidentally, Asa West’s incredible essay on the character (right here on Reactor!) says more about Molly Grue than I have space to in this essay and is well worth your time.

Through a combination of Beagle’s writing and stellar performances from Grimes, Farrow, and Lee, the film never flinches away from being about eschatological grief and the impossibility of reclaiming a lost golden age. There is an elegiac sadness in Molly Grue and Haggard both that makes the characters feel uncomfortably close to one another, despite the fact that they choose entirely different strategies for coping with their grief. The film’s sorrowful bona fides are deeply felt, even if children drawn to the story might not fully comprehend those aspects until they’re a bit older.

It’s also a beautiful film. While the animation itself is occasionally a bit clunky, the designs are gorgeous. Lester Abrams, who also was the lead character designer on Rankin/Bass’ The Hobbit (1977) and Return of the King (1983), gives his characters a charming, quirky strangeness reminiscent of Brian Froud and clearly inspired, at least in part, by Norwegian NyForm troll figurines. The landscapes have a stylish Mary Blair quality that feels both modern and classically fantastical. Some of its most breathtaking artistry comes at the very beginning, during the opening sequence in which animated versions of the Unicorn Tapestries appear over America’s haunting, hopeful theme song, setting a very high bar for the rest of the movie.

Perhaps the movie’s best quality (for me personally at least): it’s genuinely scary. Though it only lasts about ten minutes, relatively early in the film, the sequence in which the Unicorn is a prisoner of Mommy Fortuna’s traveling carnival, put on display before disbelieving peasants, is a masterclass in acting. From the design of Celaeno the Harpy, equal parts monstrous and obscene, to Mommy Fortuna gleeful embracing her own death (having fulfilled her life’s purpose by trapping the immortal beast), the entire sequence is frightening effective in inspiring both abject fear of an immortal monster and good old fashioned existential dread.

So, given how marvelous The Last Unicorn is, what are its lasting impacts? It obviously influenced a generation of fantasy fans and, like all the best entries in this column, helped to pave the way for the explosion of high fantasy content that we’d see in the 2000s. On some more specific notes, it seems absurd to assume that it did not contribute, in part, to the creation of the previously covered Legend (1985) and its unicorn-centric fairytale plot. Even the design of Tim Curry’s iconic look—huge and devilish in red makeup and prosthetics, sporting gigantic horns—feels like it may have taken some unconscious inspiration from the Red Bull. 

Speaking of the Red Bull, while the Thai trucker elixir that became the internationally popular energy drink was called Krating Daeng (which translates, roughly to “Red Bull”), I personally refuse to believe that the choice to go with that direct translation didn’t have at least something to do with the fiery antagonist of this film (even if Haggard’s creature didn’t have wings).

On a less specious note, the look of Haggard’s lonely, crumbling castle by the sea—hewn out of dark stone which sometimes takes on the appearance of tormented faces trapped in the rock—feels like it must have partly inspired George R.R. Martin’s descriptions of Dragonstone, a similarly lonely seaside castle covered in monstrous stone visages (the HBO shows radically changed the look of Dragonstone into something, in my opinion, far less interesting). 

As we’ve discussed before, Topcraft, the studio that had animated The Hobbit, The Return of the King, The Flight of Dragons and other Rankin/Bass productions, would eventually be reborn as Studio Ghibli after a bankruptcy in 1985. You can absolutely see some of that iconic studio’s stylistic roots as they’re taking shape in The Last Unicorn. And some of those design sensibilities also feel like they were reflected back by popular culture over the next few years. The Unicorn’s smooth, doelike visage feels like a precursor to the distinctly unhorselike beasts of late ’80s megahit My Little Pony (based on an American toyline, but animated by Japanese and Korean studios). And there is something in her long-limbed grace (and beast-to-human transformation) that feels like it is paving the way for young audiences to adore Magical Girl anime series like Sailor Moon which hit American airwaves in the decade following. 

But what do you think? Is The Last Unicorn as important a staple of your childhood as it was in mine? Do you have a lifelong fear of fortune tellers or a penchant for sexy trees as a result? Let me know in the comments, and be sure to join us next time as we pivot from a towering work of children’s animation to an iconic live-action film that contains at least one element that is decidedly not for children: 1986’s Labyrinth![end-mark]

The post <i>The Last Unicorn</i>: A Fantasy Classic Whose Beauty Never Fades appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews

Home of Dreams and Nightmares: The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu

A different take on the haunted house novel.

By Tobias Carroll

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Published on April 2, 2026

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In the beginning was the haunted house, and it was scary. Consider the primal aspects of the concept of home: If we’re talking in Hobbesian terms—yes, I’m making use of those political science courses I took years ago—the “state of nature” is a place of constant unrest. Presumably, a home is intended as a break from all that, a metaphorical and literal shelter from the storm. And yet there’s a flip side to that: the fear that comes from realizing that the place you thought was a safe harbor is every bit as dangerous as the parts of life you sought to escape. Or, to put in terms of early humans looking for a place to settle down and faced a rude awakening: There’s something that was in the cave first, and it’s bigger than you, and hungrier, and has very sharp teeth.

In the beginning was the haunted house, and it was enough. But there’s also the desire of every storyteller to see just how expansive they can make things, to test the limits of the boundary of this particular subgenre and see how it can be altered, shifted, and edited into something new. In this space in the last year and a half, I’ve written about Rivers Solomon’s Model Home and Cherie Priest’s It Was Her House First. Both of them could be described as haunted house narratives; they are also both radically different from one another. See also Juan Martinez’s Extended Stay (technically about an uncanny hotel) and The Handyman Method by Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan. And so we come to Kim Fu’s The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, which is also a haunted house novel of a sort, and yet feels like nothing like any of the books that I mentioned elsewhere in the paragraph.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts begins in a mysterious place: with its protagonist Eleanor on the roof of a house. The reason why isn’t entirely clear, but the section ends on an especially ominous note:

Matt, it turns out, is a realtor Eleanor is working with to buy a house. Though Eleanor has been looking for one for a while, she hasn’t been working with him long; he’s filling in for his colleague Mary, who’s taking parental leave. Gradually, Fu reveals more about Eleanor. Her mother, Lele, recently died. Eleanor works as a therapist, though her career options are limited due to leaving her PhD program early. She had an excellent reason for doing so: namely, the predatory behavior and actions of her mentor.

Eleanor is a challenging character to have at the center of a novel like this, as she’s enduring a deep depression, both from her mother’s recent death and from the lingering effects of the first years of the pandemic. (Some of Eleanor’s conversations with her colleagues are about their preferences for in-person versus virtual therapy sessions.) Her efforts to buy a house place her in a proactive place, but she’s also fulfilling her mother’s wishes by doing so. And despite the fact that Lele dies before this book begins, she is a major presence in the book, from the inheritance she left Eleanor, intended for a down payment, to the way that she and her daughter prepared for her death. If the initial allusions to this event seem sparse in Fu’s telling, there’s a reason for that: Gradually, a fuller picture emerges of how those days went, and precisely how they affected Eleanor.

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The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts

Kim Fu

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Kim Fu

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These early scenes also establish that Eleanor is already someone with a fraught relationship to the idea of “home.” Lele is an overprotective parent, as the parents of only children often are. (Full disclosure: I am an only child.) One of the people tasked with educating her instead betrayed her. Another colleague of hers, Teddy, seems affable enough, but also appears to harbor an attraction to Eleanor, which makes their friendship that much more fraught.

There’s also the matter of the house that Eleanor ends up buying, a new building that was initially created as part of a residential community that stalled out. If you assume that there’s a story there, and that that story is not a good one, you would be correct. There’s a perfect storm of events that lead to a worrisome outcome: Mark urging Eleanor to make an offer on the house right away and to forgo some due diligence in making an offer. It isn’t clear if this is him providing sound advice or trying to sell a potential lemon; in the end, it doesn’t matter. Once Eleanor moves in, flaws with the structure become impossible to ignore. There’s also the matter of Lele’s presence lingering there.

That last one is meant literally. Lele’s ghost sure seems to be a presence in Eleanor’s new home—which is dissonant in its own right, as she presumably never set foot in the place during her lifetime. That new home has a terrible history all its own, as well as a striking visual: a model home directly across from it that provides a surreal mirror to the building where Eleanor is trying, desperately, to settle in and begin healing.

Lele’s visitations are treated less as occasions for dread and more as mysteries unto themselves. Given the degree to which this novel remains in Eleanor’s head, it’s also possible that Lele’s appearances should not be taken literally. However, Fu’s matter-of-fact prose finds a good balance between describing someone whose perception of the world is askew and the genuinely uncanny things that they witness.

One of the interesting elements of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is that, title notwithstanding, the most overt ghost in it—i.e. Lele—isn’t vengeful at all. It’s reminiscent, of all things, of the film Crimson Peak, where the restless dead aren’t trying to harm the protagonist, but are instead trying in their way to warn her about the very alive murderer with designs on ending her life.

There’s a moment early on in the novel when Matt urges Eleanor to “waive inspection” that’s the home ownership version of Chekhov’s gun on the mantlepiece. The consequences of that action are both absurd and horrific, prompting disquieting images of a pristine home turning increasingly unfamiliar. This scene also establishes one of the running themes of the novel: A substantial number of characters’ interactions are rooted in simple economics, with little chance that they will ever become something deeper. 

If there’s a flaw here, it’s that Fu has placed a lot of elements into a relatively short novel. Eleanor’s grief for her mother and her reconnection to an old flame represent one thread; her economic precarity is another, as are her attempts to navigate life on her own without Lele’s active involvement in her life. There’s also the matter of Lele’s ghost and the accumulation of disasters in her house, as well as her professional travails; Fu has a knack for the way people can use therapeutic language in both appropriate and fraught situations. But there’s also a sense that this book could have been even more effective had it been longer; there’s plenty taking place here, but not all of it feels fully resolved by the conclusion.

What Fu does especially well is finding a way to make this kind of narrative feel urgent in 2026. Why are we seeing an uptick in riffs on haunted houses now? I’d point to the lingering effects of the Great Recession on homeownership and, more broadly, to a growing sense of economic precarity throughout society. A 2017 New York Times Magazine article by Matthew Desmond bore the headline “How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality,” and if that isn’t a scary story in its own right, I’m not sure what is. There are plenty of causes for dread and fear in The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts. It’s telling that the most prominent ghost among them is not high on that particular list.[end-mark]

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is published by Tin House.
Read an excerpt.

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