Microreview: Cello's Gate by Maurice Africh

 Maurice Africh’s Cello’s Gate is a Science Fantasy novel that is perhaps not quite greater than the sum of its parts. 

Captain Grey has a problem. He’s a pirate, and a good one, but the local gendarmes are always dangerous and trying to keep his airship, The Trench, flying in the air, costs a lot of money and effort. That’s why when he is offered an extremely lucrative commission to go to an island no one can get to, in order to get a MacGuffin (the first in a series) that he doesn’t think really exists--he is willing to do it. Adventure is afoot on a journey to the island and surviving its dangers, from traps, to wildlife, to an immortal being that might have created all of magic itself.

This is the story of Cello’s Gate, by Maurice Africh. 

For all of the crunchy worldbuilding in the novel, Cello’s Gate is a novel that runs very strongly on vibes. It borrows and slightly modifies a lot of those vibes and those parts and puts them all together, not always in an optimum configuration, leaving some of the interesting parts of the worldbuilding feeling like they don’t quite seem to comfortably work together or sometimes even at all.  The book is a patchwork of these elements, sometimes going at cross purposes. 

Let’s go for the high concepts and beats.  Our main character, Captain Grey Shimada owns the airship the Trench as the ostensible pirate, although, like nearly all protagonist pirates I find in SFF, he’s not *truly* a pirate, or not very much so. He has a found family of fighters and rogues and outcasts of various types, including the Pilot being married to another crew member.¹ His father, who he is somewhat rebelling against, is an important admiral.² He is hired by a client, Dalia Auber, who insists on coming along with her muscle, to find the seven Stones of Indigo. These seven are the basis of all magic in this science fantasy world, but someone who gets all seven would have unlimited cosmic power³.  Once on the island, the group has to deal with a variety of tests, challenges, and traps. Also, there is a rival group after the stones and a confrontation with their superior numbers and firepower is the real enemy.⁴

There’s plenty to this complicated world and the characters and their backstories. Aside from Grey we get a few situations where the backstory of one or other of the characters unspools and the world builds from that.  The thing is, it doesn’t all seem to fit together. I can’t make real sense of Grey’s story to begging with, he starts off as a bit of a failson hanging out with childhood friends. An especially harsh punishment for their antics sends him off to military school and away from his friends. We then go to 17 years later, and surprise, not only is Grey now a pirate, his two childhood friends are suddenly on the pirate ship he has, and part of the crew. We don’t see his father on screen except in the prologue, but just how this relationship and world is supposed to work, especially since his father backed him getting a ship, is a little murky. And the book almost feels like it was originally written that there were no holdovers from the prologue to the actual narrative, but suddenly there was a chance and we get two of them. 

Then there is the tech and the magic. The setting might have too much going on here--it’s a steampunk world with firearms, and airships, but also a complicated magic system, and also there are classes of people in that magic system. There are people who are Immortal, and people who are preternatural fights, Knights, and others. A revelation comes that there are even forbidden(?) hybrids of these as well. The author’s favorite must be the Crest Knight, since we have Dot, part of Grey’s crew, Rook, who is the bodyguard to the Immortal client, Dalia, and it turns out one of the antagonists on the island is a Crest Knight as well. Crest Knights fight so fast and so furious, that their fights are described in bullet time terms.⁵ The physical combats, and there are a number of such set pieces of various kinds, are well written and are a highlight of the book.  But then there are people like the Immortals, who straight up come back from the dead when killed. It’s a painful and unpleasant process, but that is *their* magic. Minn, Grey’s childhood friend,and something that is not quite a crush, not quite a relationship (even after knowing her for two decades)  is an Oracle and can get precognitive flashes of the future. There are other kinds of magic that we hear about but for the most part do not actually see in this narrative. 

Speaking of Science Fantasy again, though, a more general thought. Science fantasy is a hard trick to pull off, to make both the science fiction and the fantastic sides of the equation equally interesting, useful, powerful and important. As noted above, there is a lot of magic in this verse, of a wide variety of kinds that seems tied to the stones. As far as science, there are airships, and jamming fields and a variety of technology. Magic, though, with one noticeable and big exception, seems to win any straight up conflicts with science and technology that we see in the book. I suspect maybe the author was doing a bit with this. It does seem that magic is by far the more dominant half of the paradigm. 

Given that the novel is 600 pages, all of this worldbuilding and all of this wide variety of elements to the narrative does help fill up the pages. But for all of the invention in some places, the novels reaches for reference and allusion again and again and again, and the serial numbers aren’t always filed off well enough. 

However, it should be said that novel doesn’t drag, and it does know how to breathe, although the timing of the changes in point of view were sometimes off, and the withholding of information at some points only annoyed me rather than amplified my interest. On the other hand, the novel does well with a queernorm verse, something that is becoming much more the default, and less something I need to highlight except for contra examples. And, of course, this is the first in a planned series, since Grey and his crew only reach the first stone in this novel, and there are six more to go afterwards. 

Will I go on with the series? I am frankly not sure. With a lot of the heavy lifting of stuffing this world with its ideas in the first volume, it's possible that subsequent books will have a lot less of a gear shift issue than in this one. I hope so. Worldbuilding, as much as I love it, needs to flow from and to the plot and characters. The author here seems to have wanted to put in All the Cool Things into their worldbuilding, and many of them are cool, but not all of them, to me, feel like they should be in the same universe as each other. 

The Math

Highlights:

• Thick and chonky Science Fantasy

• Not quite the sum of its parts

• Good action and adventure beats.

Nerd coefficient: 6/10 

Reference: Africh, Maurice, Cello’s Gate, Saga 2026

¹ So, in essence, channeling Firefly, even if the Pilot is the wife here. There is also some Guardians of the Galaxy as well. 

² A Number of Anime have this father-son dynamic. It does make Grey more than a Mal Reynolds clone, at least, although I am not sure how it fits all that well. 

³ Despite my Aladdin joke, it’s the Infinity Stones, naturally

⁴ Given all the traps and puzzles, there is an Indiana Jones feel to it all. 

⁵ So the Matrix, with hand weapons. 

⁶ Here is a bonus secret endnote instead of a footnote, since I couldn’t work this into the narrative of the review. I didn’t like the title at all. We don’t find out who or what Cello is until late in the novel, and it doesn’t tie in with the theme or plot of the novel at all. In my view, a book title is important to attracting readers--even today, Netgalley, when requesting a book, has “Book Title” as one of the reasons you are attracted to a book.  And frankly, for me, Cello’s Gate doesn’t do that. The cover is very good, and does tell you what you are getting, right up to Dot’s not-quite light sabers.  But the title? No. It fails for me.  POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin. 

Deja Boo: Poltergeist 2

The second entry in the Poltergeist trilogy is classic kid nightmare fuel, no matter how cheesy it may seem in retrospect

The very first Poltergeist came out in 1982 and had some serious chops: It was directed by Tobe Hooper (of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame) and produced by Steven Spielberg himself. It was a major success, and is universally beloved as a modern take on the haunted house trope.

Needless to say, neither of these two powerhouses returned for the sequel, Poltergeist 2. Does that make it any less enjoyable? No, I proudly say, as someone who loved this movie as a kid and who continues to enjoy it today as an adult.

It does, however, lose a bit of its gravitas. It turns from a quaint, supernatural movie about the horrors of suburban capitalism into a wild, twisty, culturally appropriating spookfest. Once again, I found myself not remembering key plot points in this sequel. Instead, I honed in on specific imagery that sticks with you long after the screen goes black.

The plot

The Freelings, having escaped from their former haunted house (now conveniently disappeared into another dimension), are living at the wife's mother's house. They're far from safe, however, as the main spirit they battled, a 19th-century apocalypse cult leader, continues to target young Carol Ann's life force. A Native American shaman named Taylor comes to their rescue, teaming up with everyone's favorite medium, Tangina Barron (of "This house is clean" fame from the original) to help the Freelings fight off the bad juju. There's not much more to it than that, and the movie consists mainly of scary scenes/monsters/otherworldly forces. They triumph in the end (seemingly). There's a third movie, but only Carol Ann and Tangina return—not even Craig T. Nelson could be bothered to show up.

What scared me then

Look, kids don't always know what's hokey. Sometimes, frightening imagery is enough, as we've learned over the course of this month. The most strikingly scary image in Poltergeist 2 is the main baddie: Reverend Henry Kane, played by Julian Bond. He is truly frightening, in a scary-Flannery O'Connor-preacher sort of way. He's ragged and scary, all rotten teeth and sallow skin.

When he starts singing "God Is In His Holy Temple," you can't help but feel like he's going to crawl out of the screen and kidnap you. He's a worthy villain, and Julian Bond is perfectly cast in this role. He's like biologically created to scare young kids about the terrors of elderly people.

The next scene that scared the living daylights out of me was the son/bathroom scene. The Freelings' teenage son is upstairs alone (yes, in the haunted house that his parents know about), attempting to shave when the dark spirit starts messing with him. The son's spindly orthodontic brace wires start spouting out of his mouth out of control, threatening to consume him as they expand and hold up near the ceiling. His folks come running upstairs to help him, battling the rogue braces wires before they reach the electrical outlet. This scene left a profound impact on me as a young child, and even more so once I reached middle school and got braces myself.

Once again, as I reexamine the past via horror memories, I realize that I was almost continually microdosing body horror. Maybe that's part of growing up: Realizing the gross and almost comical limitations of our corporeal forms.

Finally, I've remembered my entire life the absurdity of tequila worms. In the film, the father (played by Craig T. Nelson), very obviously is fighting alcoholism. At one point, as he's downing a bottle of the hard stuff to battle his demons, he imbibes the dreaded worm—only this time, it's possessed by the evil Reverend Kane, and the father thus becomes possesssed himself. He acts rudely, threatens his wife, and eventually throws up the tainted worm, which then becomes a horrific, tentacled monster.

This monster is a triumph of disfigured, circus sideshow proportions, and thus extremely memorable for children. Or rather, I remembered the worm growing into something monstrous and obscene even if I couldn't recall specific details about it now. But to this day, I've harbored a bit of a fear about mezcal, too.

What scares me now

Watching this as a 43-year-old, I can't say there's very much that scares me. The magical Native American trope bothers me more than any ghostly fright. The special effects are fine, in practicality, but don't particularly evoke much fear. As a fan of haunted house films, the Poltergeist movies are interesting. There's something inherently less scary for me when said spooky domicile is a California ranch. It's just less atmospheric than a broody, sprawling, black-and-white Victorian manse.

The only thing that I can still sort of defend is the depiction of the Reverend Kane. It's unsettling and creepy, no matter one's age. Cult leaders with an interest in little girls transcend time and space, and are always monsters. 

There's one other aspect that was a bit ahead of its time: the idea of a person being haunted and not just a locale. This would be echoed later in movies like Paranormal Activity, but it hardly pioneered the idea. Not being able to escape a haunting is at once harrowing and claustrophobic. Not being able to escape to the safety of a hotel or a family member's is insane. My father, a former Army Ranger and lifelong cop—and who I once thought invincible—once mentioned his greatest fear was a being he couldn't stop. That still holds true for me, I think, as the idea of an escapable spirit remains frightening.

Adults can scoff at the cheesiness of Poltergeist 2, as it's just good fun, but it's very easy to see why many scenes remain with kids who watch it.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Deja Boo: SCP-1733

Going through Groundhog Day with twenty thousand strangers, forever and ever and ever...

I confess that this essay may not fully accord with the guidelines set forth by the Déjà Boo project; in any case, my editor approved it, so here I go. It’s not a film, but an article on a horror wiki. It scared me deeply at one point in my life, but that was my adolescence, not my childhood. I came upon the SCP Foundation when I was in high school from the off-topic section of alternatehistory.com, and I found this one early on in my reading of that site, in what I believe was the first half of 2013, which was my sophomore year of high school (year 10 for non-Americans). It was the first work of web horror that really got under my skin.

For those not familiar with the SCP Foundation: it is a community-written horror wiki focusing on the titular non-governmental covert organization dedicated to protecting humanity from a wide variety of anomalous entities, objects, and phenomena. Its name reflects its mission: Secure, Contain, Protect. Every mainline article (tales excluded) takes the form of a case file in this organization’s labyrinthine database, detailing the nature of the anomalous phenomenon and how the Foundation is working to protect humanity from it. This format has gone into some deeply strange, deeply scary places. I have something of an up-and-down relationship with the SCP wiki (I’ve never had the bravery to try my hand writing one myself); for one reason or another I find myself on the wiki, browsing articles until the sense of dread endemic to reading this type of horror leaks into the rest of my life, and then I put it down to recover.

For the reader: here is the article in question, written by the pseudonymous user bbaztek. It is a brief read. Be sure to click the red heading “Partial Timeline Document 001” at the end so you can see the testing logs, which are a major part of the story. After this paragraph, I will assume that you have read it.

Clearly, I’m not the only person this article left an impression on. It is one of the highest-voted pieces on the entire wiki. It has been made into a YouTube video several times by various creators piggy-backing on the brand the Foundation has built. The comments on the article are laudatory, saying it is one of the scariest articles on the wiki.

Why did this scaled-up horror take on the premise of Groundhog Day worm its way under my skin as much as I did? In the months after I first read it, my mind would wander to the sheer terror of the people trapped inside that stadium, as civilization falls around them, leaving utter barbarism in its wake.

Part of it, I think, was my particular experience of high school, by virtue of my social class, background, and area. I grew up striving middle-class in an affluent Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Like many kids from that background, there is a lot of pressure thrust upon you to make something of yourself. High school, in particular, for this type of kid from this type of background, is suffocating. This is when your grades really start to matter in the endless rat race to get into a good college, which will hopefully get you scholarship money to boot. This is the season of massive amounts of homework, extracurriculars chosen for their value on a college application, endless fretting about your grades, an unhealthy lack of sleep, and a deep, existential fear of what the future holds. As if that weren’t enough, I had a white father who worried endlessly about everything, and a Filipina mother who embodied every stereotype about the Asian tiger mother (I have explained my youth to my younger cousins as “surviving your auntie’s academic death march.” I later went to a university with a notorious stress culture over academics, to the point that it was nicknamed “suicide central” for a wave of suicides in the years before I was there, but I found the whole thing quite restful, as I could control the rhythm of the panic, rather than having it imposed on me based on my mother’s erratic mood swings).

It is very easy for a kid that thinks too much, works too much, and experiences too little to feel deeply trapped by that particular cycle. That, I think, glommed onto this SCP. This story is a repeating loop of miserable experiences that wears you down, leaving hope a distant dream. I was teetering on the edge of a mental breakdown (which finally came true my sophomore year of college), and the whole experience felt like pointless suffering. On some level I saw my experience in that story.

I had another reason, I believe. I am autistic, and as such I have a very hard time discerning what other people think of me, and what other people intended. I had very little idea if the people I spent time around actually liked me or simply tolerated. I was afraid that my peers found me stupid or annoying or downright repulsive (and, statistically speaking, I was probably right). This is an emotion that can easily spiral into worse; you begin to worry about which of your friends are actually bad people, with ill intentions. That, intertwined with the themes of the story, where just the wrong situation can throw otherwise normal people literally at each other’s throats, tapped into my paranoia. Who, given a bad day and a horrific situation, would kill me for no reason?

I have returned to this article periodically, and thinking about it, there is a lot going on here on a thematic level that makes the horror really work. What is striking is that the supernatural conceit is only scary in an abstract sense. It is, from the perspective of the unfortunate souls trapped in the recording, doors that will not open, ever. This is a scary idea primarily because the entire point of a door is to go through it. The very premise demands the consideration of the thoughts of the people who are denied passage through the doors. The horror, then, comes ultimately through the human psyche.

Human beings, obviously, live in linear time. Our very existence is mediated through the fact that we are born, we grow up, we age, and then we die. We have rites of passage for different milestones along that path that ends, for everybody, at the same destination. We become ourselves, day by day, by accumulating experiences, and through that accumulation we grow as people. Buddhism, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t necessarily deny the existence of the self. Rather, it says that the self is endlessly changing based on the experiences it has and the conditions through which it is put. We come to understand, intimately, that a man cannot walk through the same river twice.

SCP-1733 arrests the flow of time in a fundamental way. With every rewind of that recording, the lives of some twenty thousand people are reset to the same moment. But, cursedly, they remember what happened in every previous playback. They are eventually struck by the fact that none of this hell ends. It has to keep going on, and on, and on, and the sense of self deteriorates. There is now nothing to look forward to, other than macabre suffering. They are furthermore ripped from the human networks that define them—job, school, neighborhood, family—and give their lives meaning. Not only lacking a future, they could also be said to lack a history, and from there they might lack a self, and lack a meaning. They are forced into a situation where existentialism—the choice to make your own meaning in an utterly meaningless universe—is impossible. There will be no graduations, no weddings, no promotions, no births. There will simply be senseless, random deaths, right in front of their eyes, over and over and over again.

With that lack of meaning made painfully apparent, you glimpse at the different ways people try to cope with a loss of meaning. Some of them eventually kill themselves, finding a life with no meaning to be not worth living. Some of them take solace in defending others, in choosing to protect a semblance of decency as the people around them find no point in morality. Some of them simply choose to accept hedonism, and put up banners to conceal an orgy. All meaning has collapsed, so why not fuck every attractive person you can find in the arena? There are no churches in the TD Garden.

But there is another response. To illuminate it, I will turn to an oft-misquoted book that has been in some ways terrifyingly prescient: The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. No, he did not argue that the fall of the Soviet Union would lead to world peace. He did argue, though, that the rising standards of living throughout the world would lead to a sort of existential boredom that would lead many people to rage against the order that gave them such standards of living to begin with, because they want to be recognized. To quote him:

“Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.”

The experience of these twenty thousand people is, without question, existentially terrifying, and at first the comparison does not feel apt, even to me. But consider Ursula Le Guin’s words from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas:

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”

The people in the TD Garden in that recording are certainly in great pain, emotionally and existentially first, and then all too physically. And if the monotony of this awful experience can be considered boredom, you can then see how some people would find reasons to rage against whatever is available. Whatever has trapped them there is not vulnerable to them in any way they can see, so they rage against the only people who could help them.

The Faithkeepers, the zealots who escalate the situation, have created meaning through the shared experience of their confinement. This is how many groups, cultures even, have come into existence in reality. African-Americans became a group through the shared experience of slavery. Filipinos became a group through the shared experience of the brutalities of Spanish colonialism. The Faithkeepers have bonded over their confinement, and an initially vague idea as to why they are confined, namely the belief that they are being punished in some way for the excesses of life in the First World in the 21st century. They engage in violence to feel something, to give themselves a purpose, to gain recognition as people in a situation where they are mere playthings.

Note, in particular, the rituals of sacrifice they develop after several replays of that recording. The notion of sacrifice requires an initial belief that two different things are valuable, but that one is more valuable than another. This valuation demonstrates that the person conducting the sacrifice has values to begin with, and from there the beginning seeds of an identity. By sacrificing their phones, they demonstrate their belief that freedom is more important than the ability to call people. By dragging LeBron James and Paul Pierce from their locker rooms and disemboweling them publicly, they state that they value freedom more than the lives of the notables of their society. By calling for the sacrifice of children, they are saying that they value freedom more than the most vulnerable. Some sacrifices are done out of commitment to a belief. These sacrifices, on the other hand, are to create and enforce the belief, and from there to create and enforce a self in opposition to forces around oneself.

The scariest thing about this is how it echoes into this decade. Existential boredom among people, particularly rich people, has led to a massive growth in the popularity of far-right movements whose ultimate creed is utter nihilism. You have people who are bored fall into worlds of conspiracy and hate ultimately just to feel something. These people have been driven to kill, to massacre even, just to have a sense of identity in a world that is constantly changing. People will kill for a self.

And then there is the meta aspect of it: these people are suffering at the hands of a force they cannot see. We, however, can see that force: the SCP Foundation researchers rewinding the recording over and over and over again, just to see what happens. It is not a major leap of logic, then, to see that force as the reader. The horrors are happening because we want to see the horrors. This is reality television, and social media mobs, and large-scale harassment campaigns, and so many other realms in the social realm. SCP-1733 forces us to confront what we are complicit in. What horrors occur because we want to see what they bring forth into the world?

The horror of this story comes from its unmooring of one of the fundamental aspects of the human condition: time. All purpose fades away, all connection fades away, all identity fades away. As the African philosophy of Ubuntu argues, a person is a person through other people, or put another way, I am because you are. What happens, then, when people are severed from the other people who made them people themselves, and confined with strangers over and over and over again? Given the limitations posed by Dunbar’s number, most people you come across will not have any meaning to you. In confinement, you are ripped from your old meaning and forced into a process of meaning-making, and that is terrifying.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Deja Boo: The Birds

Still creepy after all these years

When I was a college freshman, my roommate had a blue parakeet. On occasion, the bird would escape the cage and fly around our tiny dorm room and I would hide under the covers until the bird was safely back in the cage. I realized back then that my fear of free flying animals was likely based on my childhood viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. I didn’t consume a lot of horror as a young child and I actively avoided graphic slasher films. The idea of scaring myself intentionally was limited to intense amusement park rides, not scary movies. As a result, much of what I saw in the horror genre were reruns of old black-and-white film classics that felt more like melodramatic gothic stage theater rather than being actually terrifying. However, one day, while flipping through the channels, I came across an old movie called The Birds, and I couldn’t look away. There are movies that will stay with you for various reasons, and not always because they are particularly well made or well acted. I was riveted by scenes of little children, my age, being attacked and wounded. And I was particularly creeped out by the attacking “monster” being something I walked by, or beneath, every day on my way to school. Without my realizing it, The Birds changed my brain chemistry when it came to the chirps and birdsong of sweet flying creatures with claws and beaks.

The story follows Melanie (Tippi Hedren), an impeccably dressed, pampered socialite whose minor hijinks periodically land her in trouble, but without lasting consequences. At a bird shop in San Francisco, Melanie and a charming young lawyer named Mitch (Rod Taylor) mutually prank each other. Determined to get back at Mitch, Melanie buys a pair of lovebirds and drives up to the seaside town of Bodega Bay to sneak them into the house which Mitch shares with his uptight, widowed mother (Jessica Tandy) and his cheerful, school-aged younger sister, Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). Melanie is helped and reluctantly befriended by Annie (Suzanne Pleshette), a cynical young woman who is Cathy’s teacher and Mitch’s ex-girlfriend. However, a series of isolated, strange bird encounters gradually escalates into swarms of massive, coordinated attacks and lethal carnage in the little town.

The Birds did a great job of creating a fear of the ordinary which, at least for me, can be far more scary than fantastical monsters or creatures. The birds in the story aren’t radioactive, alien, or super-enhanced in any way. They are just ordinary birds, en masse, and very angry at people. This is one of the early films I had seen that used the idea that any small thing, in sufficient numbers and fury, can kill you. This concept has been played out with ants, spiders, piranha, and young children, in other horror stories I saw later in life. I didn’t really worry about sharks or piranha in my home town, but birds were a regular presence in my life. I would see them massed on telephone lines or flying in formation in the sky. After the gory scene where Jessica Tandy finds a friend dead with his eyes gone, I had a new respect for birds.

The Rewatch

As part of our Déjà Boo series, I recently did a rewatch of The Birds to see how it compared to my childhood memories. Despite some dated acting and special effects (that make it sometimes drift a little towards campiness), it’s still creepy after all these years. There were things I noticed on my grownup watch that I didn’t catch or think about when I was a child. First of all, there is no music. Most films, especially from the 1960s, have jaunty background tunes or suspenseful music to set the emotional tone of the scene. In The Birds, music is absent, so there is only the natural sounds of the birds. Even in the most terrifying and violent scenes, there is only the flapping of wings and screeching of the birds and the cries of the victims.

Another thing I noticed is how slow and ordinary the start of the film is. There is no dramatic opening, chase scenes, jump scares or other intensity. Almost the first third of the movie is Melanie figuring out how to prank Mitch with the lovebirds. Even after she gets to Bodega Bay, she is still chatting with and manipulating the locals to complete her prank. I love how polished she is with lying for this small, petty thing, and I was intrigued by the way the small conversations gradually reveal the various characters’ inner demons long before they are hacked at by birds. The slow creep of the story prior to the pivotal action scenes and the lack of dramatic music created a feeling of vague, impending dread while still making the intense physical attacks sneak up on you.

The third thing I noticed on my rewatch was, well, the birds themselves. This may seem obvious, but as a child I was just freaked out by the massive amounts of birds attacking children my age. Watching this as a grownup, my brain was thinking about logistics. How did they get so many birds? How did they get them to swarm? I went down some unverified internet rabbit holes and read that most of the birds were real, but some were mechanical (which on second viewing you can sort of see when a child is pinned to the ground by a persistent bird). I also read that Tippi Hedren was surprised on set by the unexpected use of real, rather than mechanical, birds attacking her in a pivotal scene.

The final element I noticed during my rewatch were the philosophical conversations between the various characters, including several of the side characters. There are multiple times where a victim reports an attack and is disbelieved, not because they are untrustworthy, but because the listener doesn’t want to believe it could be true. There is a great scene in the town’s diner where Melanie reports that there was a bird attack on the school children, and an elderly woman who is a bird expert explains that a coordinated bird attack couldn’t happen, even though it clearly has. Another customer at the diner doesn’t want to hear the information because it will scare her two children. When the birds swarm the area around the diner, the customers stare at Melanie in the aftermath and one says that Melanie must be to blame. It’s an interesting reminder of toxic group conversation dynamics that continue to exist in our current day.

The Birds may seem tame by contemporary standards, but as a child I was riveted by the bird attacks, especially since children were often the targets and they were being attacked by real-life creatures that I regularly encountered. While the gore was mostly kept to a minimum, there were several jump scare scenes with an eyeless corpse or a man engulfed in flames or a child with a bird pecking at her neck. These scenes were enough to leave an indelible imprint on my young thoughts. As a result, The Birds remains a memorable experience as one of my first horror films.

Highlights:

• No music, so many birds
• Jump scares
• Kids always in peril

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Anime Review: Kaiju Girl Caramelise

A cynical, thoughtful, funny twist on the usual coming-of-age rom-com anime

As the world around us feels more stressful, the proliferation of anime rom-coms offer a sweet retreat, and an alternative to the (often equally cathartic) intense or violent adventure stories. With charming characters, poignant moments, the overcoming of insecurities or childhood traumas, and slice-of-life coziness, all of these tropes can be a perfect balm to a stressful day. When you’re in the mood for that kind of vibe, I highly recommend a few of my favorites: The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity, You and I are Polar Opposites, the very underrated and funny Tamon’s B-Side, and the ultimate evening chill show Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You. However, my latest guilty pleasure is a bit of a departure from the general sweetness of the romance anime genre. Kaiju Girl Caramelise offers a different kind of rom-com, in the form of a gender-swapped, building-crushing, monster love story that’s wild, funny, and unexpectedly meaningful about external appearances and the pressure to fit in.

Kuroe Akaishi is a high school loner who dresses in dark clothing and avoids socializing due to her unusual “skin condition.” But this is more than an inconvenient allergic reaction. When she gets overstimulated, her hands turn into thick claws, she grows a monstrous tail, and eventually she begins to turn into a giant (skyscraper-sized) Godzilla-like monster. As the new school year begins, a popular and beautiful boy, Arata Minami, becomes attracted to her, despite her outcast status and her intentionally goth appearance. This newfound and very genuine attention leads to dangerous overstimulation in the worst way as Akaishi finds herself reluctantly attracted to the boy despite her grumpy, self-conscious attempts to avoid him. But as their relationship grows, she loses control of herself more frequently and begins to fully transform into her enormous fearful kaiju form, which the locals nickname “Harugon.” Although afraid of the creature, Minami feels an unexpected connection to it and treats it with empathy. Minami struggles to manage the constant social pressure he feels at school, but he soon finds himself at the center of national media attention when the rampaging Harugon publicly shows kindness and restraint with him. Meanwhile, Akaishi is both horrified by her nightly transformation and property damage and stressed out about figuring out what kind of creature she really is, while also angsting about her unintentionally toxic affection for Minami. Fortunately, Akaishi is supported by several women in her life, including her single mother, a scientist, who has a major secret related to Akaishi’s transformations. Akaishi is also supported at school by unexpected new friendships from Manata, a wealthy, kaiju-obsessed classmate, and Reiru, a cosmetics expert and fashionista who has her own unexpected physical appearance secret.

For a show with such a funny and light premise, Kaiju Girl Caramelise has surprisingly solid commentary on society’s focus on physical appearances versus true emotional connections. All of the lead characters have an unexpected side that fits this theme. Akaishi is a shapeshifting teen girl and destructive Godzilla monster. Despite this secret, her new friends support her, and her dreamy boyfriend loves her even though something seems off. On the other hand, Minami is popular because of his good looks, but his childhood was one where he was overweight and bullied, making him now overcompensate by starving himself to stay “beautiful” and by being automatically social and warm with everyone. The cycle of hyper-popularity due to his physical appearance is exhausting and toxic for him, and it gets even worse for him when he becomes the focus of national attention. Rich and pretty Manata is obsessed only with the monstrous Harugon creature, to the point of jealousy of Minami’s public connection to it. And Reiru channels her physical insecurities into a thriving social media presence about creating your own beauty, since beauty is essentially superficial. Later in the series, a boy, Daichi Yoneyama, appears to be a rival to Minami, but he is also not what he appears to be.

Interestingly, when Akaishi transforms into Harugon, she is not only physically monstrous, but she also changes emotionally, becoming more volatile, impatient, and frustrated. Akaishi will often acknowledge her escalating temper during her transformation. This is a change from shows like Kaiju No. 8, in which the transformed protagonist (Kafka Hibino) remains sweet-natured and tries to moderate his monster form while retaining his sense of humor. On the contrary, although Akaishi usually tries to calm herself down to stop her initial transformation, once it is complete, she relishes her monstrous side and finds it exhilaratingly cathartic. In one very funny scene, she thinks (incorrectly) that Minami wants to make out with her, and she knows that will trigger her potentially deadly kaiju transformation. Instead of leaving him or trying to calm down, she instead says, “Sorry, Tokyo, you’re all doing to die tonight.”

While Minami is the ultimate green flag, cinnamon roll character, the show has fun with gender-swapping the traditional monster and damsel-in-distress roles. In Kaiju Girl Caramelise, the giant, bridge-stomping monster is a girl, while the beautiful, kind-hearted, person in peril is a boy. When Minami first encounters a rampaging Harugon, he feels a familiarity with it after looking into the eyes of the monster, and he, at least subconsciously, realizes he has a connection to the creature. We soon have several moments of the kaiju catching or saving Minami, while the news cameras are rolling, which in turn causes Minami to become a national sensation, nicknamed the “Kaiju Prince.” But it is always clear that the real strength of the show is Akaishi. She remains a realistic combination of boldness, insecurity, humor, strength, cynicism, and thoughtfulness.

In its short run of episodes, Kaiju Girl Caramelise succeeds in being sharp, cynical, funny, and surprisingly thoughtful about the societal pressure for a “beautiful” appearance and the value of struggling to push past the superficial expectations. It also has a great deal of feminism and positive girl power energy as Akaishi, Reiru, and Manata all support each other and even find unexpected support among their female classmates. The show will periodically venture towards traditional mean-girl territory and then subvert the usual tropes with something that is actually and surprisingly positive. Despite the funny rom-com set up and completely enjoyable story arc, Kaiju Girl Caramelise has enough heart to be more than the deliciously guilty pleasure that it seems to be.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Gender-swapped monster romance
• Surprisingly positive messaging
• Funny, enjoyable guilty pleasure adventure

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Deja Boo: Child's Play

Child's Play still holds up after 40 years, and is a film that is most likely still scaring children into avoiding their dolls

This movie was the one. The one that caused me to forever fear dolls. Now, is it happenstance that I was also a tomboy in the late 1980s and didn't really like them anyway? We'll never know. But I can say that this movie personally traumatized me, and it's perhaps the scariest Deja Boo I'll personally revisit this month.

Since its release in 1988, Child's Play—or less formally known as "Chucky"—has spawned a franchise of six sequels, a TV show, and a reboot. I think it's easy to forget how chilling the first movie was back when it was just a standalone film. The intervening years have sort of Flanderized the demonic doll into a evil, sardonic toy version of Deadpool. That's okay, there's clearly an audience for this sort of thing.

But when you rewatch this first film that launched everything, it's an incredibly frightening supernatural slasher that sticks with you. Like with Killer Klowns from Outer Space, I don't recall ever sitting down and watching Child's Play from beginning to end when I was a kid. It was whispered about in playgrounds, featured in the lineup in the papery-thin HBO viewing guide that came in the mail, and stacked three deep in the horror section of my local video stores. That was plenty exposure for a young Haley to say absolutely not and bid adieu to even the innocuous Teddy Ruxpin that had previously been living in my room.

There's an easy explanation to why the idea of a haunted doll terrorizes children. They're things of comfort, given to you by a loving adult. They possess an emotional safety that binds you to them. If they suddenly turn on you and at the very least cause trouble—and at the very worst threaten you—you're liable to not be believed. It's only a doll, they'd say. Stop playing, Mom would counter.

Therein lies their fear.

The plot

Chucky is a possessed doll that comes to life in Child's Play, and finds his way via happenstance to the home of young Andy and his single Mom in Chicago. Chucky is the cartoon star of a popular kid's cartoon, and Andy is obsessed—he even has Chucky's trademark blue overalls in the form of pajamas (another terrifying thing to watch given the ubiquity of Chucky in pop culture now). His mom is struggling to stay afloat, but manages to buy a stolen Chucky doll for a song from a back-alley peddler.

Chucky eventually comes to life, and begins tormenting Andy and his family. We find out that Chucky is actually possessed by the soul of a local serial killer who, upon being shot up by a cop played by Christopher Sarandon, utters a magical voodoo incantation and sends his essence into a 2-foot doll.

As a possessed doll, he's not just there for a good time. He has Andy take him via the L train to a sketchy part of town where he can take vengeance on his former accomplice. He then goes and visits his voodoo master, who tells him that he can only come back to corporeal form if he says the incantation again in front of the first human to whom he revealed he was alive. In other words, he now has to kill Andy.

Andy, his mom, and Chris Sarandon eventually figure this all out, and manage to take him out—but not until after he's been kicked, stabbed, shot, and burnt (very Rasputin of him).

What scared me then

Honestly, it was more the idea and image of Chucky that got me more than any specific scene. Seeing a red-headed doll—even if only in brief swatches—was terrifying. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. There's a reason Chucky is up there in the mononym club like Michael, Jason, and Freddie. He's mean-spirited, vulgar, and has zero problem killing men, women, and children.

I think more than the idea of him, though, was his visage. All dolls to me are unsettling, really, but Chucky is beyond the pale. He's creepy when he's the happy, harmless, smiling version of the real-life doll. But when the serial killer's soul wakes up, he contorts the doll's face into an angry, twisted sneer, and the eyes glisten with hate.

It was scary then, and it's scary now.

What scares me now

First, I want to explore what's more disturbing: If Chucky's deranged-supernatural-serial-killer-possession origin was never discussed, or the fact that it is. I think the not knowing would be more disturbing actually, because it would be more like a random act of terror. Him having the backstory somehow makes him more human, I think, so for me it's a little less scary. Now, I still wouldn't want to confront either one, of course, don't get me wrong. But random acts of violence are inherently less upsetting than a situation (no matter how far-fetched) that can be explained at least a little.

The scene where Andy's mom realizes that this stolen doll she bought for her son is truly, evilly alive, is so stark and horrifying. She's looking over the box he came in, and then—the included batteries fall out. This thing has been talking and moving by itself. All of a sudden, all the things Andy's said Chucky's been saying and doing make a lot more sense. It's alive.

Seeing Chucky amble out in the wild, even at a distance, is discomfiting. There's a scene where Andy is watching Chucky run up some outdoor stairs towards him, knowing that Chucky will try to kill him. It's a brief scene, and some may call it a throwaway, but I found it oddly scary. You see this little bright red and blue doll scurrying up steps, moving on its own volition. It's scarier, to me, than any close-up special effect, because it just seems… real. There's an urgency to it that can't be shaken.

Towards the end of the movie, after they've tried repeatedly to kill Chucky, he gets burnt to crisp, all blackened wax and sooty skin. He's alive still, and at this point, at his most physically disgusting. I think this part is especially scary because not only is he a haunted doll, which is frightening because he resembles a real child, but he's also burnt beyond recognition. No one wants to imagine a badly burnt child, but that's exactly what he resembles. It's horrific, and it compounds the fear you've been facing all movie-long to this point.

Child's Play is an upsetting movie, and I feel a little justified in being such a scaredy cat about it in my youth. I dare any parent to let their child even know this movie exists—you'd have the same situation.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Deja Boo: The Brave Little Toaster

Baby's first introduction to the inevitability of death

I will confess to you now that The Brave Little Toaster never made me cry. It’s not the sort of movie that made me fear that there was a monster under the bed, or anything like that. But I do remember, vaguely, being fascinated by the film all the same. I couldn’t really tell you why; I liked talking cars, so that last musical number had an enduring appeal to me. But, as those of us who have actually watched this film could tell you, the actual content of that musical number will in retrospect make people question my upbringing.

This is a movie that I remembered fondly throughout my youth but for the longest time never actually sat down to rewatch. I rediscovered the soundtrack on a Reddit thread (more on that later) and would listen to it during certain tough times. I did not, however, dedicatedly watch the film again. The film is from 1987. I was born in 1996. I watched it in the early 2000s. And in the Year of Our Lord 2026, I watched it again, staring down the gunbarrel of thirty years old.

I must admit: this film is dark for a children’s film, but is dark in a way that is perhaps not obvious to a child. Your basic plot is that five appliances—a toaster, an electric blanket, a vacuum cleaner, a lamp, and a radio—have been left at the country cottage of a city family. The appliances miss the child that they had provided for for so long, whom they call “the Master.” After years and years of being left in the cottage with little sight of the Master, the appliances get together and decide to brave the wilderness to find the Master and resume their lives of faithful service. It turns out, though, that the Master has grown up. He is no longer a child, and in fact he is setting off to go to college, and from there adulthood.

In that premise alone there is a lot to unpack. This is set during high Reaganism, the age of “greed is good,” the age when America assumed what was profitable and what was good were in fact one and the same. What is striking is one of the assumptions made by the film (based off of a 1980 novella by acclaimed science fiction writer Thomas Disch) about its characters: the idea that their fulfillment is found in service. This is an idea that, by itself, sounds very Reagan-era. The film literalizes the concept of a “dream job” by downright stating that these characters are pining for a state of continued servitude. But, if you cock your head a bit in a certain direction, you can see this in a much more liberatory way. Everyone wants to make a living doing what they love, what they’re good at, and you can read the appliances’ quest as a quest for self-actualization. But if this is a metaphor for self-actualization, the metaphor fails a bit; tools are designed to be used for specific purposes. Human beings are simply born.

The appliances march through a dangerous wilderness to the city. This wilderness isn’t particularly dangerous to human beings; indeed Indigenous people had lived in them for millennia (the nature of this film looks vaguely like that of the Mountain West—the radio mentions Utah as being a different place, so I am very tentatively willing to guess that the film is set in Colorado, but really it could be somewhere between there and northern California), though I would suppose that a city-dweller would need some teaching. In any case, these are not humans, but human creations. They have to navigate the wilderness using a vacuum’s wheels and a battery tied to an office chair, and to get out of scrapes, they have to use the vacuum’s cord (they use it to swing across a river once, and another time use it to get the blanket down from a tree). But what they all discover, with emotional force so intense they sing about it, is that this world can be utterly beautiful. Their own sense of purpose has locked them in a house, pining for somebody who isn’t there, and they have denied themselves so much because of it.

They eventually find themselves in the possession of a man who works with appliances like them for a living, a rotund tinkerer-cum-salesman by the name of Elmo St. Peters. He works what is, for our main characters, a grisly trade: he sells appliances, and more disturbingly, he sells appliance parts. Your characters are therefore plunged into an actual horror story for beings of their nature. You get another musical number, led by a hanging lamp with an unnerving resemblance to Peter Lorre. Elmo St. Peters is a man who can be read as the evil doppelganger of the Master: the Master uses his appliances to help himself, thereby actualizing them, while Elmo St. Peters uses his appliances to help himself, thereby dismembering them. You, and they, are confronted with the wildly different meanings of the verb “to use.“

The appliances eventually make it to the Master’s new home, an apartment in the city. They are met by the shiny new appliances, cutting edge for the 1980s and hideously dated by modern standards. That’s where the film shows its age the most; the old vacuum looks very much like a modern vacuum, and the titular toaster is very close to the one I have in my house. The computers and stereos and all the other things in the new apartment, however, look very ‘80s, and this becomes ever more in your face as they sing about how new they are in a tune that is filled to the brim with synthesizers of that era (as well as an obvious Carmen Miranda parody at one point).

And then we get to the junkyard scene. This is the part of the movie that I remembered vividly, even in the twenty-some years I didn’t watch it. This is the song that I found in a Reddit thread that became a talisman for me in times of misery. I listened to it a lot right after I graduated high school, before finding a proper summer job, having been put through the rite of passage that those of us my age, give or take a few years, went through: being driven from store to store by your parents and ordered to ask if they had any job openings, only to be told to apply online (maybe one store let me fill something out there—this was summer 2015). I listened to it a lot during my mental health crash my sophomore year of college (I showed it to at least one therapist). I listened to it, again, in the wake of my suicide attempt, an attempt born out of guilt.

But describing it in words won’t do it justice. Take a few minutes and watch it.

Look into my virtual eyes and tell me this isn’t the darkest shit you’ve ever seen in a children’s film. Occasionally, in college, the swing dance and ballroom dance clubs I was in would share the songs from the movies they loved as children. Most would have some sugary song from the Disney Renaissance. I would show them this, and they would give me weird looks.

Again, I think that I liked this bit as a child because of the talking cars. It’s certainly a catchy tune, with bits of surf rock and a driving beat that would make it easy to swing dance to (I have never had the pleasure, unfortunately), written by the acclaimed Van Dyke Parks. As an adult, this scene encapsulates the themes of the film in a terrifying way. You are literally staring into the jaws of death! How did anyone let this get put in a children’s film? (A big part, by my understanding, was having it made independently rather than financed by Disney). This is a song about feeling left behind, the feeling that you belonged to a different era. Long-time science fiction readers may notice a thematic overlap with George R. R. Martin’s 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag. That is a work dominated by nostalgia and the fear of being left behind. The characters are aging rockers whose heyday was the swinging ‘60s, the age of free love and peace and the antiwar movement. It is a book that is the hypercapitalist, reactionary, money-obsessed ‘80s looking back at the freewheeling, anti-establishment ‘60s, asking where the time had gone.

I’m going to go through that song car by car. I think it deserves it:

The first car we don’t get that good of a look at, but he’s a common person’s car, a means to get from here to there. He’s very much the person who’s thrown too much time into their job and has lost any sense of self. He reminds me of my father.

The second car is more artistically clear in her intent: she’s a car of the optimistic Space Age of the ‘50s, with her sleek design that calls to mind rockets. She is a paean to lost optimism.

The third car is a ‘50s hot rod, with the raspy voice of an aging rock star whose voice has been destroyed by booze and cigarettes. He’s one way of looking at lost youth, tied to a very specific time and place.

The fourth car is a race car of the type common in the interwar years, who realistically couldn’t hold a candle to the cars of the ‘80s. He’s about how skills and senses degrade as you age, and how the highs of youth cannot be recreated afterwards. He’s the car most comparable to an athlete.

The fifth and sixth cars are a limousine and a hearse, respectively. The former sings of a wedding, the latter a funeral, and these are implied to be for the same man. They are clearly the same model of car in different livery to suit different purposes, and sent together into the maw of death. Sex and death are so commonly intertwined in art, and that is the case here. One begets the other.

The sixth car is the reason why, whenever I want to listen to this song, I listen to a version ripped directly from the film rather than the official soundtrack. For on the soundtrack they bowdlerized her lyrics and overlaid a weird-sounding new line that juts out like a nail. I understand why they felt the need to do this, as it is the most openly sexual of any of the verses. This car is reminiscent of the VW vans that the hippies loved, and the surfboard on her roof is self-explanatory. She is the embodiment of the swinging ‘60s, the age of free love, and (as Jack Weinberg put it) never trusting anyone over the age of 30. By the time this film was made, those bright young people would mostly have settled down, reached middle age, taken corporate jobs, and started families—and I suspect that several of them would have watched this film with their children. This segment is another catchy song with talking cars for children, but I can imagine it was a shot across the bow for their parents.

The last car is downright tragic. He is a work truck, left forgotten to rot, deemed superfluous as his owners looked for a better future in the city (here, Santa Fe). Notably, this is specifically stated to be on a reservation, and from the mention of the Hopi later on we can guess this is the Hopi reservation of Arizona (surrounded, incidentally, by the larger Navajo reservation). The time this car was made useful would have been the age of the Red Power movement, when the Indigenous peoples of the continent demanded that the settler state and the settler society remember that they were still living, breathing peoples, not dead ones. This truck is a forgotten tool of a forgotten people, and those layers of forgottenness leave him only one course of action: he is the only car to voluntarily take his place on the conveyor belt to total destruction.

This is a film that is frankly much scarier as an adult than as a child. I am now months away from thirty, the age that society has decided is the end of your fun and the end of your youth, the year you are supposed to be an “adult,” whatever that means. I am autistic, and I have ADHD, which means that I have been “behind” several “adult” milestones. I still live with my parents, because everything in Northern Virginia is hideously expensive. I only got my first job at 25, and I am still there, because the job application process is hell for people like me. I have never had a relationship. I have never even dated anyone. As someone who has spent his entire life chasing an ideal that I simply cannot reach, the themes of obsolescence of this movie resonate with me deeply. Part of me wonders if such great thematic work is wasted on children, but on the other hand, I would never have seen it as an adult had I never seen it as a child. It is a seed that grew into a great and mighty tree that has borne many fruits, and it has done so because the fear it is based on comes for us all.

And, if you're so inclined, it's now on Disney Plus.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.