Review: Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

The adversary in no man's land

cover artist: Julia Lloyd

This is my first Daniel Kraus, and I came to it because it won a prize and because I’ve been on something of a horror kick the last few months. In case you didn’t know, Angel Down won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and another of his novels, Whalefall, is about to hit cinemas.

This is by way of saying I don’t think I would have picked this up if it wasn’t for Kraus being seen by other people first. Talk about the things you love, folks.

>It’s also a novel that’s quickly become (in)famous for its treatment of punctuation. Angel Down is told as a single sentence. There are people who’ll raise their eyebrows at that, others who’ll say that books should cater for the reader first. I have no time for either. I love it when writers play with the form of the novel as much as the text. Sure, it doesn’t always work, and sometimes it’s clear the writer thinks they’re cleverer than they are, but so what? Personally I think we should reward ambition and intensity and reaching for the edges of things.

Still, stuff like this can be a gimmick, and by that I mean they add nothing to the narrative, the sense and atmosphere of the novel itself.

Kraus’s first big achievement, then, is to make this structure work. He does it in a specific way that allows you as the reader to breathe while also rendering the entire story urgent and imminent in a way that more conventional punctuation would have missed.

This urgency, the quasi-stream of consciousness that Kraus invokes on the page, is essential to the tale he builds over the course of the book, and I didn’t even notice I’d not seen a full stop until three or four pages in. Then I noticed, and then I thought hard about what it was accomplishing, and then I relished getting back to the rest of it.

The story itself follows one Private First Class Cyril Bagger: scumbag, conman, son of a bishop who lost his faith and, mostly, concerned with surviving the First World War no matter who else dies in the process.

Bagger has spent most of his life insulating himself from feelings towards his fellow man. He’s done this because feelings make it harder to steal from rubes, fools and the greedy, and these folks are Bagger’s congregation.

If his father is a bishop, in one of the endless self-made Puritan inspired American expressions of Christianity, then Bagger is his own sort of preacher—one of confidence and misplaced faith, of chance and getting ahead of those around you. Bagger’s view is the distillation of the American dream—the idea that you can make it big, built on the truth that if you do, others can’t. Kraus illuminates in swift strokes of the pen how the American Dream is built on a zero-sum game where, for you to win, many others have to lose.

And Private Bagger is determined to win that game—other people are his stepping stones.

The thing is, in the battalion in which Bagger serves (and swindles soldiers around him to go over the top on his behalf), there are very few good men of his acquaintance.

On a morning when the familiar screams of the wounded fill the air from no man’s land, Bagger and four of the worst soldiers in the battalion are left behind by their commander as the rest of the unit marches away. Their mission? To find and “help” the person screaming. By which they know to kill them, as that’s the easiest thing they can do.

Kraus has the patter and feelings of these fellows down—he has done the work to make this feel like a specific time and place. Attitudes, technology, experiences are all there situating Kraus’s characters in the most miserable of trenches at the end of WWI.

I think this would be enough to tell a story with. Erich Maria Remarque did it with All Quiet on the Western Front and told one of the most profound anti-war stories ever seen.

Kraus does something different here. This setting, with its horror—bodily, social, political and existential—morphs into something else when they discover that the person wailing in no man’s land is no wounded soldier. They retrieve an unconscious body whose appearance none of them can agree on, save to say it’s a woman (clean and unspoiled by mud, war or time).

Krauss departs here, using this woman’s presence to help outline each of Bagger’s comrades, to show them at their weakest and most venal, their most desperate and most vulnerable. None of these men are good, but none of them are quite intentionally evil either.

Don’t get me wrong, part of Kraus’s theme here is that men do evil things and relish them for the benefits they bring them. However, he’s also quite clear that it is this equation, that evil brings good things to those performing the evil deeds, that drives so much suffering and harm.

Krauss doesn’t say that this justifies acts, or even that the perceived and actual benefits of doing evil last. He just carefully lays out how ordinary people are quite capable and willing to do evil to others if it helps them get what they want in the moment. It’s not even that they’re great planners—a momentary feeling of satisfaction can be enough. We see this in the acts of complying in advance we have observed in the USA since White Supremacists came to power there. For each valorous act of resistance there are the equivalent acts of cowardice, complicity and collusion.

Bagger and his comrades are prepared to suffer so long as it means those around them suffer more. Kraus is clear that each of these men are traumatised, but also that they brought nothing but themselves to the war, and those selves were already primed to walk paths in which other peoples’ suffering was a price they were happy to see paid.

War is misery, says Kraus, but war exists because we make it. Where, then, the blame?

I don’t want to say too much about the story here—it is a gossamer thing which rewards a lightness of expectation and a lack of foreknowledge, especially around who this woman is and what she wants. I'm going to elide the way Kraus treats the uncanny too. It is good but nothing special in its own right. It's the service to which he puts it I find especially interesting.

Suffice to say that Kraus is, I think, playing with our ideas of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, not simply with the story but with the way he’s written the book. Bagger is human. In the end he can’t escape feeling things for the people around him. He hates this as much as it’s a salve for his soul. Kraus isn’t writing a Disney movie here—the real story isn’t the friends he makes along the way. It is about the choices we make—the ones we barrel through and feel are inevitable because we are hemmed in on all sides, as well as the power to stop and choose something different, something new, something that can break not just us but the world around us.

There are revelations that Kraus delivers to people who think about changing but often cannot, or who might try but have no moral muscles and so can’t make it stick. The weight is too heavy to lift. So they find change hard and leave it untried.

Angel Down is a horror novel. It is a speculative novel. It is an anti-war novel. It is a novel about the American Dream. Most of all it is a novel about how, across our entire lives, it might be that only one choice matters and how we might miss it because we sleepwalk through life without considering what we do and how it changes us and the world around us.

It’s not about agency per se; it’s about moments when who we are and what we choose matters, about how the rest of our lives might seem full of choice but are, really, expressions of us playing in tiny little prison cells where we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking we’re acting across the entire world.

Kraus, in the end, skewers the idea of agency as the supreme good in the same way a tender philosopher might skewer the idea that free will is absolute, and he does so with the uncanny and the otherworldly sitting in judgment of our hubris.

Highlights:

• One freaking sentence
• Layered, thoughtful and mystical

Nerd coefficient: 8/10, a superb experimental novel that has a lot to say about the things we take for granted as good and the things we might really consider if we wanted to actually do good.

Reference: Kraus, Daniel. Angel Down [First Atria Books, 2025].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at @stewarthotston.com.

Woman of Tomorrow deserved better than this lackluster adaptation

Supermeh

(First things first: of course the dog survives. This movie may be mediocre, but they’re not that foolish at Warner.)

The comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a wonderful piece of art. It dances between moments of striking action, serious thought and generous color. It absolutely deserved its Hugo nomination in 2023. So it’s a strange whiplash to sit for the two hours of this year’s Supergirl, which supposedly adapts the comic but unnecessarily restricts itself to an emotional range between ennui and sullenness, and to a visual palette of dirty yellows and dusty browns. If this is the movie Warner chose to make, one has to ask: why did they adapt that particular comic, and what did they like about it, and why doesn’t it show up anywhere in the movie?

In Supergirl, Superman’s cousin Kara is drinking away her childhood trauma when she meets Ruthye, an orphan on a mission of revenge. Ruthye hopes that Kara can help her hunt down the interstellar outlaw who killed her family, but Kara can’t be bothered to get involved—that is, until said outlaw poisons her dog. Now it’s personal. During the quest to find the cure for her dog, Kara learns to become a heroine.

The basic outline of the plot has a lot of potential for drama that the film doesn’t fully utilize. When we meet Kara, she’s a mess. Unlike Superman, who didn’t witness the end of Krypton, Kara was old enough to live through the whole tragedy, and though her cousin is a fellow Kryptonian, she doesn’t feel he’d understand her suffering. So she routinely travels to planets where the red sun cancels her superpowers so she can numb her pain with alcohol. The encounter with Ruthye should give Kara an opportunity to create a meaning and a purpose for her suffering by serving as a guide to another orphan who is also confused and directionless, but instead we get clumsily inserted blocks of exposition and endless moralizing.

For a movie that is set on several planets, Supergirl looks disappointingly bland. Space locations should be weird and surprising, but the set designs we get look generic and lazy. I’m going to show you an image from the comic and one from the movie so you understand the magnitude of the problem.

Supergirl sends us to half a dozen planets that look all the same and may as well be any dilapidated neighborhood on Earth. Aside from the briefest shots of alien faces in the background, there’s very little sense of the wonder of traveling across the galaxy. On its own, this movie looks just ugly. But as an adaptation of Woman of Tomorrow, it’s unforgivable.

And as an action movie, it’s scattershot. Not only does it resort to conveniently depowering Kara too often; when she’s at full power, it’s not clear how much strength we should expect of her. Last year we had Superman punching a kaiju and holding a whole building with his hands; here Kara struggles to deal with a handful of bandits. There’s a ridiculous scene where the plot forgets that she has superhearing and X-ray vision, and the villain stabs three innocents right under her nose, while she’s less than a block away and actively searching for him. The moment provides juicy drama, but it shouldn’t happen with this character.

This is not exactly a bad movie, but rather one that had great material on its hands but took the boring option every time. The villain’s visual design is so over the top that it goes full circle into forgettable, the twists are obvious (there’s a family of helpful locals that have WE WILL BETRAY YOU painted on their faces), the pacing is broken by misplaced flashbacks, and the delivery of some crucial character-defining lines is careless. In the trailer, Kara says “My cousin sees the good in everyone, and I see the truth” with the tone of proper gravitas that it deserves; in the actual movie, she blurts it out like she’s annoyed at the thought. Does she disapprove of Clark’s philosophy? Does she disagree with being a hero? What does it say about Kara that she finds it easier to connect with a dog than with Clark? We get no clue.

Supergirl should have been the story of a detached loner who discovers a cause worth the risk, a cynic who learns to care. But it stays stuck in cynic mode for too long, and in the end it’s hard for the viewer to care, either.

Oh, and Lobo is there too. I don’t know why.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: Villain, by Natalie Zina Walschotts

Everything's connected, and it's all fucked up.

Six years ago, Hench appeared, the first book in this very fine exploration of the nuances of villainy, and the dangers of knee-jerk support for institutions we are instructed to regard as the good guys. How much of superhero vs. supervillain is good vs evil, and how much is merely antagonist against antagonist? Even if we flip the good/evil spectrum, how many of the superheros are actually baddies, and how many of them are mere victims of the self-serving machinations of their institutional overseers?

Villain picks up where Hench left off, with our narrator, Anna Tromedlov fully embodying her new name of The Auditor. She has become Leviathan's right-hand woman; she runs the organization in his name while he plays dead, and drives policy when he returns to the job. As Leviathon’s team continues its conflict with the Draft – the institution that controls and organizes superhero activities -- her relationship with him develops along lines that would be tedious and predictable if they were so gosh-dang thematically grounded: What types of intimacy can define relationships, and how do they interact with institutional control? This book refuses to offer any easy answers. It’s all kind of fucked up. And, to misquote Tolstoy, exploring the domains and degrees of fucked-up-edness is where all the fun lies.

Let’s take the question of intimacy. Nemeses are very explicitly presented as if their mutual hatred behaves exactly like love. After any superhero’s death, the funeral events traditionally include a Night Service, during which the venue is left symbolically locked and unguarded at night. This allows villains to symbolically break in so that they may pay their own respects. Everyone recognizes that nemeses, like allies, need to mourn. And the Auditor does mourn: I wish we had more time, she thinks during Supercollider’s Night Service. I could have hated you so much longer.  She feels hollowed out by his loss: A deep sense of loss sloshed around in my chest. Without Supercollidor to focus on, there was a great void left behind, a huge volume of hatred without a focal point. Replace 'hate' with 'love' and this could be the ending of any tragic romance. 

The Auditor is not the only one to feel this way. Leviathan is utterly undone by the loss of Supercollidor, spending the first several chapters of the book, Achilles-like, sulking in his office. During the Night Service itself, Doc Proton, a token hero left behind to guard the venue, can be soothed only by the intervention of Decay, his own nemesis, into whose arms he collapses in tears. Later, Leviathan explains the nature of this intimacy during a conversation about the combativeness developing between the Auditor and an ex-hero, named Decoherence. ‘The greatest divisions are a single degree from perfect understanding,’ he says. ‘She could be the great hatred of your life.’ And he says it with a degree of jealousy, because her recognizes that the intimacy between nemeses can be a genuine obstacle to the more conventional romance he wants to pursue with the Auditor. After all, he himself was not able to consider such a thing until now, after Supercollidor is dead.

But what does this kind of intimacy entail? Leviathon is not the best romantic partner, in ways that could be a reflection on types of coercive control in domestic relationships, but which I myself find much more interesting to interpret in light of his role as the boss of a vast institution. Don’t date your coworkers, and definitely don’t date your manager, amirite? 

Personal/institutional power relations are the other thematic pole of this book. To what extent do individuals have power over their own lives in a world controlled, surveilled, and manipulated by institutions? The Draft kidnaps any child with supernatural ability, and indeed will disappear non-supers as well, if they have useful skills. The deeper you are enmeshed, the less control you have, until eventually people become indistinguishable from the forces they serve. We see this process in action everywhere. ‘Mom’ – an aspiring leader of the Draft – has no private life outside of work, and no weaknesses that Leviathan's team can exploit to interfere with his quest for institutional power. The auditor of the Draft, who aspires (and fails pathetically) at being the Auditor’s nemesis , tells her at one point, ‘This isn’t about work. This is about you…’ to which the Auditor reflects, I wasn’t sure I even made such a distinction anymore.

The role of chosen names is a really lovely detail that ties into the nuances of this point further. Decoherence has adopted her new name after leaving the Draft – and her Draft identity of Quantum Entanglement – behind. A team of young heroes include Thundersnow, whose name arouses repeated comment, to which she always replies simply 'I’m Canadian'. A new teammate of Thundersnow's is transferred over from a previous team of fascistic bullies, among whom he bore the name Riot Shield. (A wealth of commentary on how purportedly good institutions like to whitewash appalling violence in that detail alone!) Now, to distance himself from that previous role, he calls himself simply Shield: pure protection, no fascism involved.

But how much of this nomenclatural flexibility represents actual control over one’s individual life, and how much is merely window-dressing for the deeper control that institution exert over everyone in their power? Thundersnow never says actually, call me Susan. She can choose her name, yes, but only as long as it fits the theme of superhero names, consistent with the role the Draft has chosen for her. The reason Decoherence is still involved in this whole mess is because she recognizes that the heroes of the Draft are victims as much as they are perpetrators of evil, and wants to persuade them that they can just leave (more on that in a moment).

Even the Auditor herself shows that this phenomenon is not restricted to Draft-affiliated individuals. When she attempts to make contact with her best friend from civilian life, she has to go back to calling herself Anna, and has to work through some Feelings at realizing that this name no longer fits. Only her institutional name is an accurate description of the person she is now.

At the Night Service, Decay warns the Auditor of the danger of dissolving oneself into one’s role. Her face is not known yet, he tells her. She is not a symbol of Leviathan's institution yet. She can still walk away. She can still detach herself, live her own life, be her own person. She refuses this path – only to be offered it later, by Mom. Except this time the opportunity is no longer a genuine personal choice. Mom shows her a spreadsheet, in which all the damage she has done acting for Leviathan is weighed against the future good she could do if she leaves . She doesn’t even need to join the Draft, Mom says – she can join an NGO and live an independent life, doing good to balance the scales she has so badly tilted during her time working for Leviathan. Like the names, though, this offer does not represent genuine autonomy. The very existence of the spreadsheet shows that any future good works a hypothetical ex-Auditor might carry out will always be under scrutiny and evaluation by the Draft. It’s just a more palatable version of the Draft’s desire to control every individual’s behaviour. 

A third invitation to leave comes from Decoherence – not as a representative of villains, like Decay, or as a representative of heroes, like Mom. Decoherence has no use for any of those: ‘Fuck all of them,’ Decoherence says. ‘Leviathan and the Draft are just opposite ends of the same fucking spectrum.’ Decoherence wants to be truly, properly independent, and she wants the Auditor to join her. Although Leviathan sees her as a prospective nemesis to the Auditor, Decoherence and the Auditor dance around the friendlier side of that spectrum in most of their interactions.

Love, hate, intimacy, control, institutions, autonomy – it’s all interconnected. It’s all fucked up. This book does not shy away from exploring how, and why, and it does not propose any solutions. To the very last sentence, all it can offer is the opportunity to understand the problem. 

--

The Math

Nerd coefficient: 9: very high quality/standout in its category

Highlights:

• Squishy, nuanced exploration of themes
• Pretty awesome superhero vs. supervillain spectacle
• Messed up romance

Reference: Walschots, Natalie Zina. Villain. [William Morrow, 2026].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.

TV Show Review: Widow's Bay

Funny and Scary are Subjective

I started writing for this site way back in 2013, which may as well have been when dinosaurs were alive in internet terms. It's been one of those rare things in life that is just good, and I've gotten to (virtually, at least) meet some absolutely incredible, talented, and just plain good people over those years. It does my overactive imposter syndrome absolutely no good to share my frequently sarcastic ramblings with people who are actually talented and know what the hell they're talking about.

Not least among these is the guy at the top of the masthead, Arturo Serrano. Go read anything he's written, and then come back here for something not anywhere near as good (that Encanto review is probably my favorite thing that's ever appeared on this site. I'm so sorry for everything you have to read now). So when I watched and loved Widow's Bay, and pitched writing this piece, his response was that he wasn't really 'vibing' with it, because it's billed as a horror/comedy, and, well, it's not that funny, my immediate reaction was 'wait, why do I like it? He knows way more than me!". Therefore, I watched the rest of the show with a more critical eye. I might be wrong, but I still like it (he will probably edit this piece to say something like "I drink cold hot dog water" or something, but I stand by it).

But I get why - like I said, it's not really funny. Fear and laughter are two sides of the same coin - misunderstanding, or a lack of understanding, is the key to both. Much of horror depends upon the impossible - the killer with the slow, plodding, methodical walk still catching up or appearing around every corner. Charles Schulz said that misunderstanding is the key to comedy (or words to that effect). Like horror, we see something we don't understand (or the protagonist doesn't), but here our caveman brains decide it's not a threat, and humor results. 

Marrying these two is a hard task to do well. If it's not threatening enough, it's just a comedy (see: any number of Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright films), if it's too threatening, it's not funny. For my money, Widow's Bay strikes this balance very, very well - it just doesn't do it with jokes. Before I get to how, let's set the stage:

The titular Widow's Bay is an old New England island that was a home port for whalers. It's cursed by some ancient evil, and this first season takes us on a tour de force of not just the manifold manifestations of the curse, but the commitment the curse has to making sure it checks off every horror movie genre. Haunted by an ancient creepy woman? Check. Teenagers were murdered in slasher fashion and now the killer is back? Check. Creepy puritan family historical horror? Also check. Each episode is a different flavor, which is mostly fun, but makes for a weird tonal shift sometimes, and it feels like threads are abandoned in order to jump to the next genre. It makes you wonder exactly what the Lovecraftian horror lurking is up to, exactly. But there is a season two coming, so maybe all that ties together. 

Our protagonist is mayor Tom Loftis, played brilliantly by Matthew Rhys, following his equally brilliant role in 2025's The Beast in Me. This role is a complete 180, where in The Beast in Me, he was charismatic and sinister, he is now unassuming, insecure and tries to do the right thing, but does so in that way which is borne of needing everyone to like him. He is a widower, has a son in his late teens, Evan, who is doing boy-in-his-late-teens things like getting high and going places he shouldn't. Normal teenage rebellion is exacerbated by the fact that he lives on a cursed island he can't leave, only he doesn't know any of that, just that he hasn't ever left the island and his dad is pretty absent despite, ya know, being trapped on an island.

Alongside them - calling them 'supporting characters' would be an injustice - are the wizened old sailor, Wyck (Stephen Root), and his awkward assistant Patricia (Kate O'Flynn), and the cranky, chain-smoking old lady Rosemary (Dale Dickey). The character dynamics of all of these (plus a few others who are in truly supporting roles) lend to a lot of the comedy. Wyck is gruff, self-assured, well-versed in island lore and prone to believing in curses and superstitions - which, in this case, is a good thing. Patricia is awkward, and an outcast, even on an island with a trapped population, and she and Wyck end up being a great odd-couple pairing (not romantically). Meanwhile, Rosemary finds ways to be offended by literally everything they do, while still hanging around all the time. A good chunk of the comedy comes from simply letting them bounce off each other. 

As I mentioned, the comedy doesn't lessen the horror - and while there are slasher elements, or, more accurately, one slasher-adjacent episode, most of it is a slow burn and creepy. The fourth episode, Beach Reads, may be one of my favorite episodes of TV in recent memory. It's representative of so much of the show, where the ostensibly innocent has the unshakable feeling that something is off - like I said, misunderstanding, or lack thereof, creates a feeling of dread. I won't spoil it, or say too much, except that they did an amazing job of making an innocent-seeming book seem creepy, and the payoff is immaculate, littered with just enough clues and brilliant camerawork that makes you sit upright, and nervous about what is coming next.

Widow's Bay uses this against us, though, to set up the humor, and this is where I fully embrace it, and others might not enjoy it as much. I grew up on M*A*S*H, which means my humor and martinis are both very, very dry. Jump scares in Widow's Bay are all innocent, right when you think something bad is about to happen. Moments of tension are interrupted, not by knee-slappers, but by someone being intensely awkward. All of this dovetails together to make you not trust anything, so when (small spoilers) we spend a whole bunch of time (KINDA/SORTA SPOILER ALERT) with what seems like a sweet old lady, it feels like something is deeply wrong and is about to be revealed, but it turns out, she is, in fact, a sweet old lady. Instead of humor and horror working against each other, Widow's Bay uses them to compliment each other and work in concert, deepen the creep factor, ramp up tension and the fear of the unknown. Sometimes the tension is relived because it's funny, sometimes it's relieved because it's very much not. 

--

The Math:

Highlights:

• Perfectly blends horror and comedy in a way few things have
• A great cast of characters, beyond the ones I've highlighted. They're delightful, and quirky, and the acting is great (I also love that Stephen Root and Dale Dickey were both side characters in Justified, which is always a way into my heart)
• Fun exploration of different genres. This is another thing I won't fault someone for not enjoying, but I didn't mind it.

Lowlights:

• If you're looking for a hide-behind-your-pillow, scare-you-senseless type show, this ain't it. The creep factor, and a feeling of foreboding are well-done, but it won't scare your socks off (and I'm a weenie)
• The same goes for jokes. It's not Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright that will make you ROFL or whatever the kids say these days. The comedy is dry, and dark.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 - well worth your time and attention. 

Dean Smith-Richard is the author of 3204AD, and will definitely publish something again one day, probably. He loves to cook, play baseball, and is way too much of a craft beer nerd. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and likes the rain, thank you very much.

TV Review: Phantom Lawyer

Lawyers, ghosts and lots of emotional intensity in the latest fantasy K-drama

Lawyers are awesome, but they tend to be, at best, background characters in speculative fiction. With a few notable exceptions, including Daredevil and She-Hulk, lawyers are not normally the heroes in fantasy adventures. So, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the premise of one of the latest K-dramas, Phantom Lawyer. Netflix’s Phantom Lawyer is a sweet, change of pace adventure about a newly minted attorney who can see ghosts. As a result, he quickly gets caught up in each deceased person’s need for justice. Despite its cozy comedy set up, each segment delivers plenty of adventure and drama, as well as a big emotional hit that will have you reaching for your tissues.

Newly licensed lawyer Shin I-rang is smart, kind, and personable, but he is rejected for employment by all of the law firms in town, despite his solid qualifications. He soon realizes his misfortune is due to the reputation of his beloved father who died years ago as a disgraced, corrupt attorney. (Put a pin in that because it will drive much of the narrative in the later episodes.) I-rang decides to open his own firm but can only afford an office building previously owned by a shaman. The space is haunted by the spirits of various ghosts who appear only to him and can involuntarily possess him at times when the ghost gets particularly stressed out. Although I-rang is initially reluctant to interact with them, he gradually builds connections with various ghosts who need resolution and justice before they can move on to the afterlife. With the help of a priest who was previously a shaman, I-rang begins to understand the strangeness of his encounters with dead people. Each ghost’s story is explored and resolved over two episode segments in the sixteen episode series. Most stories are murder mysteries but some ghosts die in other ways that are still entangled with a resolution in the justice system. I-rang is frequently opposed by the no-nonsense, high powered attorney Ha-Nyun. Over time she becomes disillusioned by her firm’s tactics and becomes intrigued by I-rang’s unique ability to access hidden information about the deceased. This leads to jealousy from her managing attorney whose father is a former close friend of I-rang’s disgraced father. Although, I-rang initially keeps the ghosts a secret, he eventually reveals the truth to his supportive brother in law who is a part time actor. The brother-in-law is primarily a comic relief character who uses his acting skills to help I-rang in various schemes to help his dead clients. I-rang also regularly enlists the aid of a progressive priest, Father Matthew, who is an ex-shaman and helps with managing the ghosts transition to the afterlife. Ha-Nyun and I-rang are both often aided by the support of the by-the-book police investigator Kim Hyun-Woo, whose quiet awesomeness makes him one of my favorite characters on the show. There is a very slow burn enemies to love-interest story between Ha-Nyun and I-rang, and both Ha-Nyun and I-rang bond over their own emotional trauma from the death of close family members.

The series is primarily a comedy but each victim’s story involves significant emotional intensity that catches you by surprise as the plot evolves. Unlike most traditional murder mysteries, the victims in Phantom Lawyer take an active role in seeking their own justice, often directly helping with the investigation and supporting I-rang when he gets discouraged. This self-determination keeps the story positive despite some very stressful circumstances. Each two episode segment involves the death of a completely different type of character and has a Law & Order type set up with a death and mystery. However, in addition to each victim’s story, the series has a larger story arc for both Ha-Nyun's personal tragedy and ultimately I-rang’s confrontation with his dead father. These big story arcs add depth to the series with both the extra layer of plot and the intense emotions.

However, despite the clever storytelling, the show’s primarily comedic tone wears thin at times and the obligatory hijinks sometimes slows the pacing of the story. If you are watching Phantom Lawyer with subtitles on Netflix, you may want to set the show to 1.25 and speed throughout any extended shenanigans and then slow back down to normal speed when the real action and emotional intensity resumes. Fortunately, lead actor Yoo Yeon-seok does a great job of delivering the physical humor of being possessed by a range of characters (from a grumpy ancient shoemaker to an angsty teen girl K-Pop star to an energetic grade schooler) while also pulling off intense tear-jerker moments. There are also some moments where both Ha-Nyun and I-rang make dangerous choices that seem particularly unrealistic given their day jobs as lawyers.

Despite some pacing issues, Phantom Lawyer is an entertaining foray into lawyers as heroes and the law as a heroic option in a fantastical story. The focus moves beyond the technicalities of courtroom arguments and shows each victim and each surviving family member as authentic human beings. The series doesn’t shy away from the sad stories and upsetting fact patterns that unfortunately reflect the reality of life. But, by giving the victims a voice and some onscreen self-determination, we get a story that is ultimately uplifting and satisfying, especially if you’re a fan of lawyers.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Balance of comedy and emotional intensity
• Skippable hijinks
• Clever storytelling with plenty of adventure

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

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

The Recluce Reread: The Magic Engineer

Welcome dear readers to the third installment of the Recluce Reread! Today we’re going to talk about The Magic Engineer, which is the book that sort of answers the question you probably were not asking when reading The Magic of Recluce and wondering “where does Recluce get those wonderful toys?”. It starts here, some 300 years after Creslin and Megeara founded Recluce in The Towers of the Sunset. 

Chronology only matters to a point in the Recluce series and that point is just how much the reader cares how everything fits together. I *mostly* care how everything fits, by which I mean I like to see the connections between novels but because Modesitt jumps around so much in time through the 25 (so far) published novels that those connections are often little more than threads.

For example, The Magic Engineer is set 300 years after The Towers of the Sunset and the founding of Recluce. Creslin has already passed into legend and is spoken about in magely circles but also in the sense of “Recluce doesn’t have a Creslin” and there are thin hints about descendents. The Magic Engineer is also a good 1500 years after the Alyiakal novels, which are thus far the earliest set and still 650 years before The Magic of Recluce and the final books of the setting.

The novel begins very similarly to The Magic of Recluce. Dorrin is not Lerris facing the dangergeld (terrible name, by the way), but he’s not not Lerris facing the dangergeld. Those who can’t accept Recluce’s rules in their core will face exile, but those whose parents can afford to pay for Academy schooling, they can be trained to have a greater opportunity for success. That’s Dorrin, a young blacksmith who doesn’t quite fit in, doesn’t accept the answers that he is given, and really all he wants to do is just make his machines that he is insistent are order based but the magisters of Recluce say otherwise. So away he goes. 

I’ll confirm as I re-read more of the series, but this is likely to be my least favorite Recluce novel. It’s not that I dislike Dorrin, he’s a fairly standard Recluce hero, but I much less enjoy reading about Dorrin than I do most other protagonists. I liked it him far less early on than I did Lerris, impressive as that is, and only really settle in to Dorrin’s story once *he* is settled into Diev and doing the mundane work of smithing and trying to a) figure out how to make his giant engines and b) how to earn enough gold to be able to do so. As far as that goes, it’s a fairly standard Recluce story: Try to live a peaceful life, forced by circumstances to live in interesting times, feel forced to act, explosive conclusion. Rinse, wash, repeat.

I do find it interesting that Dorrin is the one who wrote The Basis of Order, the small tome (presumably small) that underpins so much of subsequent order teaching - though it only appears in a few books. Maybe it’s because it’s so prominent in The Magic of Recluce and I only read that a couple months ago so it feels fresh, important and ever present.

Otherwise, we get the founding of Nylan the city and more importantly (maybe), the origin of the black warships used in The Magic of Recluce and what seemed in that novel to be the true foundation of the power of the island nation.

But what I’d really like to read and am almost certainly not going to get is something set in and around Recluce in the 200+ years between The Towers of the Sunset and The Magic Engineer to see how Recluce developed after Creslin and Megaera passed away. I know not every period has the bits of explosiveness that Modesitt likes to build towards - but given that he tells stories that lives in the mundanity of the day to day, I’d like to read that story.


Related Short Story: Artisan: Four Portraits and a Miniature

This story runs concurrently with The Magic Engineer and is a series of glimpses into the life of another the not-a-dangergelders who started with Dorrin, Jyll, a painter. It starts with her inability to accept the Recluce life (from the perspective of the magisters, of course), her semi magical violence, and her gradual maturation through the episodes of the story until it intersects back with Dorrin at the end of the novel. 

I wouldn’t say so much that it fills in gaps as much as it just shows that other lives are continuing and weaving in and out of the narrative viewpoint that we are given in The Magic Engineer. It’s not one of my favorites from Recluce Tales


PUBLISHED BY: Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Winner. Minnesotan.

Film Review: Toy Story 5

A treasure trove of worthy ideas wasted in a movie that has no reason to exist

In Toy Story 5, our girl Bonnie receives a computer tablet that now consumes all her waking hours, and the toys are worried that they’re going to be abandoned. Jealousy and misunderstandings ensue. I think it’s time to ask in what year the Toy Story universe is set, because if anyone at Pixar has kids, they should have noticed that the preoccupations explored in this newest film in the franchise have been discussed and analyzed to death since literally the last century, and this plot adds no fruitful arguments to the conversation.

Traditional toys worried that they’ll be replaced by a newer, shinier electronic toy was the plot of the first Toy Story, back in 1995. Just one year later, the world saw the launch of Tickle Me Elmo, the Tamagotchi, the Game Boy Pocket, the Nintendo 64, the Palm Pilot, and the Yahoo Kids portal. Then, in 1997, came the Tetrix Robotics Kit and the Digimon (the virtual pets, not yet the TV show). And in 1998 came Betty Spaghetty, LEGO Ninja, Imaginext, and the Furbies. All that happened before there even was a Toy Story 2, which had nothing to say about the Tamagotchi and its cousins.

So who is the intended audience of Toy Story 5? If it’s the nostalgic fans of the first film, it’s absurdly late to say anything about electronic toys to viewers who already moved on from the death of their Tamagotchis. If it’s today’s children, this film has nothing useful to say to them either, given that what they have to deal with is Minecraft giving them malware that can steal their data, Fortnite pressuring them to spend more and more on loot boxes, Roblox serving them on a silver platter to pedophiles, and ChatGPT teaching them how to kill themselves. This movie makes a big gesture of concern for the dangers of digital entertainment for children, but it shows no awareness of what those dangers are.

I’m not saying that the Toy Story franchise has used up its potential. But it needs to make a more serious effort to stay relevant. For example, toys in this universe are cursed with immortality, accumulating lists of past owners across generations. So there are much more interesting stories that could be told with this lore. The new gadget in Toy Story 5 is a supposedly kid-friendly tablet computer, and because toys have sentience, this computer can take its own initiative to use its browser, email, chat or camera functions, acting as an agentic AI without constraints. With that character there’s a lot that could say about today’s AI craze.

Or consider the small army of Buzz Lightyear dolls that are set loose on the world at the start of the movie and eventually learn that the sole purpose for their existence is to play with kids. Why can’t one of those toys wonder whether maybe there’s more to life? Barbie, of all things, did a deeper exploration of the meaning of a toy’s life than Toy Story 5 (and the fascinating questions raised by Forky from Toy Story 4 are completely forgotten in 5).

It seems that toys in the Toy Story universe are expected to resign themselves to a life of unquestioned subservience, much like the robots in Star Wars. Jessie the Cowgirl, who takes a more central role in 5, laments the fact that children grow up and forget their old toys (and makes the laughably boomer-coded observation that those new digital gadgets are making them grow up too quickly), but even after going through an extended reflection on the pain of repeated abandonment, she doesn’t question her assigned function, and even considers it an honor to be used as a literal plaything for an unknown number of lifetimes.

The core ethos of Toy Story may be the heart-warming “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” but friendship happens between equals, and the dynamic between a child and a toy that can never reveal it’s actually sentient is far from equal. All the fanciful imaginary adventures that the toys enact are decided by the child, with the toys forced to go along with them. Once you really give it some thought, where’s the fun, let alone the honor, in such a life?

Toy Story 5’s solution to Bonnie’s difficulty in adjusting to digital culture is to find her a new human friend who also likes traditional toys and doesn’t bully her on a public chat. That’s a more reasonable narrative choice than a flat “machines bad,” but it implies that a whole swath of “kids bad” is left unexamined. Sure, hurray for the handful of kids still interested in playing with toys, who would otherwise face the existential horror of immortality inside a shoe box, but when it comes to the many, many more kids whose playtime consists of interminable sessions of Candy Crush or Angry Birds or whatever it is that today’s kids are into, the movie just gives up on them.

The safety of children in the digital world is a very real concern, and Toy Story 5 doesn’t have anything to say on the matter that rises above tired Black Mirror-level platitudes. If you want a good animated movie about the absurdities of electronic life, try Ralph Breaks the Internet. That one’s from 2018, and the points it makes feel more relevant than this year’s Toy Story 5. Try to keep up, Pixar.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.