Verlyn Klinkenborg · ★★★★

Ornery, often contradictory, and written with an air of authority that proves one of his most provocative points: clarity in prose is more compelling than logic. It is a perspective that has rattled my own sense of what makes writing effective. I appreciate this book. I like how it focuses on the single sentence as an essential entry point for any type of prose: from essays to novels. I found myself paying more attention to the sentences I read and silently noting their grammar. I even got back into a little sentence diagramming for fun (stop, it IS fun). This is a thin volume but worthwhile for anyone who just wants to focus on the important parts of writing.

Virginia Woolf · ★★★★★

There are many, many books I love but this one is my favorite. Updated review 5.26.26: I've read this book 4 or 5 times in my life - I started before the advent of logging everything we do on social media. Each time I come to it I find it hard to believe I ever read it in the first place. Every sentence feels fresh and full of dazzling ambition. There are big moments I wait for, which are my favorites: Time Passes, "I have had my vision", etc. But the rest of the book has literally no filler. Every single line is notable, works from a fascinating angle, pushes the boundaries of literature from a position of empathy few other writers even attempt. I could quote this book daily, and I would essentially quote the whole thing. Maybe I ought to create a social media bot for that. It would be unnecessary, however. Instead, I'll just keep returning to read this incredible novel every so often. I'll keep being inspired by Woolf's way of handling scenes of characters thinking about other characters as a way to show how they think of themselves. How she paints a vast subconscious network of thoughts that make up what it feels like to exist as human beings. As for what I can say to really convey how I feel about this, my favorite book. No better than to quote the book itself: "The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low."

William Gay · ★★★★

I'm so glad I started my introduction to William Gay with Provinces of Night. Not that this one is bad - far from it - but it has much more genre centered interests. With moments of shockingly beautiful prose, Gay narrates a dark, gothic thriller here and the enlightenment on offer is, in my opinion, capped by its fantasy. How much meaning can one wrest from a sordid tale of an evil man pursuing a good boy through Tennessee wilderness? The plot construct is far too removed from anything relatable to easily convey a higher order of meaning. Still, the cast of characters is fantastic, and Gay puts together a violent and exciting book, a genuine page turner, with plot lines that fall neatly in order by the last page. This is a good book. Not the most original but originally written. It is also interesting, historically, to see how he debuted considering what he wrote later.

William Gay · ★★★★★

William Gay's Provinces of Night is built on a proposition about being human: how we string lives along a continuum of images and reactions to them. This novel makes that case sentence by sentence. I haven't been this blown away by a novel since I first started discovering them. That's about three decades ago for anyone counting. I'll admit, I am susceptible to the beauty of the English language used to its highest level. Living in Spain has certainly restricted my exposure to this, but I would argue that, no matter the reader's context, Gay is a master craftsman who has been starved of the readers he deserves. I've been obsessively posting quotes from this novel on my Bluesky feed all month. Listen to this one: Light through an intricate wickerwork of branches moved and swayed, moved and swayed. Light and shadow latticed together moved endlessly on the earth and she stared at it, thinking for a time that she could divine pattern there, order. But the pattern was as random and unordered as life. If you are the type of reader who holds a highlighter to their books, by the last page you'll be carrying a book soaked in neon. The novel is stopreading gorgeous. His visual ideas are persistent and poetic and they firmly establish Gay's perspective as a writer. He sits close to his characters and observes them, notes what they see and stays disciplined about restricting his narration to their actions and their speech. The few times he does let the reader in on a character's interior, the effect conducts a shocking intimacy. Check out this scene between Fleming, our inexperienced protagonist, and a girl who picks him up one night while he's living by himself in the woods: In the oblong area of light she posed for a moment like a parodic ballerina then pulled the dress over her head and dropped it to the floor. She slid her panties down holding them momentarily with a toe to step out of them then turned breasts bobbing to close the door. She vanished. He heard the thumbbolt click. It seemed to take her an eternity to cross from the doorway to the bed, in its span folks were born and lived their lives and died, whole generations passed away. When she slid against him he had decided to remain calm and save all these moments for bleaker times, each instant a snapshot, a flower pressed in the pages of a Bible. But when she grasped his hand and placed it on her sex his mind reeled away and images shuttled like unsequenced frames in a film. He was unaccustomed to such urgency, and he thought that perhaps this was the way things were done in Detroit. She was pulling him onto her, saying, here baby, I'll do this, and he felt himself sliding into her and she was whispering against his ear, No, baby, take it easy, slow down, we've got all night to do this. In addition to being hilarious ("he thought that perhaps this was the way things were done in Detroit"), there's a throughline of light to dark, exterior to interior, distance to closeness in this small passage that is so concise without ever feeling labored, and this is my catnip. This is also Gay's greater project as an artist. Provinces of Night takes its title from a line in Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, and the two writers share a dedication to a particular type of writing craft: both build meaning out of units of light and their description. McCarthy will spend the opening of a scene on someone lighting candles in the dark before the image widens. Gay works the same vein, but without the Epic Authoritative Biblical voice, without the weight of fate. He is humbler than McCarthy, and warmer. He loves his characters, even the ones he knows are simply violent, and he watches them think, and while they think, they notice the natural world of light around them. What the book arrives at, by watching them long enough, is this: we string lives along a continuum of images and reactions to images. I'm not sure how many of you have heard of or read William Gay. Hopefully all of you and I'm just catching up. Writers, of course, have their own legacies to tend to. Wolfe's Of Time and the River, for example, threads through Provinces of Night: early on, Fleming (the kid from the sex scene above, aspiring writer, seventeen, reading his way out of Tennessee) finds a paper bag on his doorsill, a gift from the uncle who loves him, Thomas Wolfe among the three books inside, two twenties and a ten taped to page one. Much later, the other uncle (a hex-caster who sells $50 curses from his mama's porch) turns up carrying the same book and asks whether it's Fleming's. Fleming takes it out of his hands and swings it into his face, bursts his nose, opens a cut by his eye. A thousand pages of American literature, with the price of a curse stuck to page one, wielded against the man who trades in curses. A boy trying to become a writer, claiming that inheritance by swinging it at the family that would stop him. A scene too perfect to criticize for its belabored metaphor. Look Homeward, Angel is the Wolfe most readers know. It's lyrical, attentive to the music of American English, a coming-of-age, and Gay's novel belongs to that tradition even when it's putting the other Wolfe to use as a club. Faulkner's shadow is on the book too, as it is on anyone writing Southern literature: the poor characters, the gallery of personalities, the gothic setting. But Gay is warmer than Faulkner and less interested in the nasty or the experimental. The tradition he belongs to is the one Wolfe opened. If I am at all responsible for turning you on to this writer, I will have done my small part spreading a fine work of American literature further than its natural popularity has taken it.

2026 · ★★½

God, Hans Niemann is insufferable.

2022 · ★★★½

I liked this more on the second viewing. Maybe (definitely) my standards are lower now but the relationship between the sisters and the attempt to codify a modern franchise film using trademark metacommentary was admirable, given its impossible task.

2023 · ★★★½

Though it was short on meta-creativity (can a franchise break out of itself?) this one wins with a more violent, dirty mask Ghostface and an interesting character arc for the sisters.

2026 · ★½

So unfortunately, because Melissa Barrera decided to violate her contract and post articles claiming the Holocaust was being used as propaganda to help Israel arms deals, denying rape happened on October 7th, and that hostages were being treated well by Hamas - all egregiously antisemitic claims and outright Hamas propaganda - Spyglass Entertainment fired her, wanting no part of her odious opinions associated with their business. I believe if she had just showed concern for the treatment of Palestinians and the way Israel was violently overreacting to the disgusting invasion on October 7th she probably would have weathered the incident - she might have even been allowed to use the word genocide, but I get it, I live in Spain: some Catholics have a Jewish problem and the war crimes being committed by Netanyahu seem to have given them carte blanche to let their vile, backwards little opinions fly free.

Being American I definitely get hating a government leader - but you never hear calls to eliminate the United States make it to the mainstream.

The very real consequence of all this is that we have this movie, which is perfect evidence that everyone, especially audiences, loses in our timeline. What kind of hellscape do we inhabit that the mire of Middle East politics has ruined our horror movie? If I had a time machine I would try to explain this to someone who just saw the first Scream because I would like to measure our contemporary insanity by their reaction. Anyway, Kevin Williamson directing a Scream film for the first time was not a bonus feature. He cannot direct, and neither can he write features. He's a TV guy who got popular a long time ago for having an ear for overexplanatory teen dialogue. Let's just say his art has not developed.

The cast producers were stuck with, the only real options available, consisted of legacy characters we had already moved on from in Scream VI, but what are you going to do? No one else was left. The thing they came up with at the last minute is terrible: plot holes, inert staging, lazy performances, and no real ideas. I sincerely hope the franchise dies with it.

Let's give someone else with an original idea a shot. At some point features and series swapped their logic; now franchises outlast their welcome by decades while the shows worth watching get cancelled after two seasons. This movie is a monument to that madness. We can't go on like this.

2026 · ★★★★

I fully expected this to be a complete throw away movie. Not funny, possibly boring, and probably derivative. I am happy to report I was very wrong. I laughed so hard! I was doubled over and in tears during certain scenes ("I crave nectar!"). It has been a long time since I've seen a movie this genuinely free to be its goofy self and I completely connected with it. I hope we get a new BriTANick feature every year!

Kaveh Akbar · ★★★★

Martyr! is a novel with a great conceit and prose that serves its story well during stable moments when the book's structure isn't being spun around for the writer to find purchase on such vulnerable material. There were some melodramatic moments I didn't connect with but the writing flowed and the humor is just great so I had an easy time breezing through to the end. If this were longer or held a little more still I think its themes of martyrdom and addiction could have deepened further and made a more lasting impact.

2026 · ★★★★

Vomit all of Sam Raimi's quirks directly into my face for any number of hours, please. He is a filmmaker who has always felt comfortable towing the line between comedy and horror in a way that allows magical stories like this one to exist.

The direction could so easily have turned cartoonish and broad but instead he is able to lift his unrealistic moments by way of satire into the realm of allegory. Even the fever dream low point which seemed to exist merely to provide its character an arc (no spoilers) felt okay by the time the credits rolled. The whole movie steeps in its own unreality and it is fantastic to watch.