6 Books with Martin Cahill

Photo by Cosette Carlomusto

Martin Cahill is an Ignyte Award-nominated writer of fiction and non-fiction living just north of NYC, with over twenty short stories published across magazines such as Reactor, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and many others. He is a contributor to Critical Role: Vox Machina – Stories Untold and the author of Critical Role: Armory of Heroes. His debut book, Audition For The Fox arrives on September 16th from Tachyon Publications. You can find him online @mcflycahill90 and his website, martincahillwrites.com

Today they tell us about their six books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

For review, I’m reading Sarah Gailey’s Spread Me and C. L. Clark’s Fate’s Bane, both of which I’ve been looking forward to immensely. On my own time, I just finished The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain by Sofia Samatar, which was even deeper, richer, and more brilliant than I had thought it would be, I’m halfway through Dead Hand Rule by Max Gladstone, fun and thoughtful and epic all at once, and I’m about to start Cadwell Turnbull’s last book in his Convergence Trilogy, A Ruin, Great and Free.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Oh man, where to begin! The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri, The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes, King Sorrow by Joe Hill, Queen Demon by Martha Wells, Happy People Don’t Live Here by Amber Sparks, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine by Kristina Ten, and You Weren’t Meant To Be Human by Andrew Joseph white.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

You know, I just found my original ARC of one of my very favorite books, All The Birds In The Sky by Charlie Jane Anders and having finished her newest (and spectacular!) novel, Lessons in Magic and Disaster, I have a real hankering to go back and remind myself of why I love this debut in particular so dang much.

4. A book that you love and wish you yourself had written?

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Brilliant, beautiful, bittersweet, surreal, and so utterly human. It is relevant and timeless, both, and mesmerizing in the ways only great art can be, as page by page, she pulls you away from the world and into the many halls and tides and rooms that our protagonist occupies, and adores. Whew. A true masterpiece. 

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

The Redwall series by Brian Jacques is what comes to mind immediately, and the more I think about it, the more true it becomes. From all those many books I learned much of the art of writing and storytelling in general; each book spoke to me in different ways but they all celebrated that you could balance serious storytelling with moments of bright whimsy, that you could look danger and hardship in the eye and still offer it a place at your table, that good and bad would always exist but they were not always equal, and not always so binary. That simple things were worth fighting for, and loving; that it was better to go together; that there is worth in rest and enjoying the taste of cherry and dandelion cordials, in spite of bad days and deep fear. And personally, it taught me that you could be a young mouse named Martin and that even if it didn’t happen that day, one day you would find the heart to stand tall and face your bad days.  

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

Audition For The Fox is awesome because it is more than one thing at any given moment! Time travel? Yes. Trickster gods and other divine beings? Yuh-huh. In-world fables about said gods? Sure thing. Distinct prose styles in every section. Oh yes. Comedy in moments of great crisis? Quite! Epic storytelling and worldbuilding balanced against character? Indeed. Audition For The Fox has a little bit of everything, and I don’t know if it’s always perfect but I do think all of the above work hand in hand to tell a unique, heartfelt, sometimes funny story of proving oneself, resisting oppression, standing up for the little guy, and doing what you can when you feel you’re powerless. I hope you pick up a copy and enjoy!

Thank you Martin!

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Book Sale Finds: Mental Hygiene by Ken Smith

I haven’t had this much fun with a book in quite some time 

 

I first heard about this book, which chronicles the many hundreds of classroom educational films produced from the late 1940s through about 1970, on a podcast about the evolution of the American teenager, and I tracked down a copy at a used book sale. Used copies are readily available online, and if you have even the slightest interest in independent filmmaking, ephemeral films, or retro pop culture, I can’t recommend it highly enough. 

You know these educational films from their endless parodies on The Simpsons, usually starring Troy McClure, or featured appearances on Mystery Science Theater 3000. But you probably don’t know the people responsible for making these movies, the reasons they became so prevalent, and the way in which, taken as a whole, they chronicle almost the entire postwar American experiment. 

Ken Smith profiles hundreds of these films, along with the individuals and companies responsible for making them. But beyond that, Smith weaves this information into a broader story told with a lot of insight and humor. In fact, the longest section of the book is a catalogue of hundreds of titles with blurbs about each of them. When I first got my copy, I figured I’d read the narrative chapters and probably skip the catalogue, or just look at it as a reference source. Instead, Smith’s descriptions were so entertaining and in many cases the choices the films made were so bizarre that I found myself reading the whole thing, and often subjecting my family to the descriptions after I broke up laughing while reading on the couch.

At the time this book was written, these films were not available to the public. Smith combed university archives and relied on the assistance of icons in the film preservation field like Rick Prelinger to screen these films privately and subsequently write about them. Thankfully for big ol’ nerds like me, many of these films are now available on YouTube or archive.org. I put together a playlist if you want to dive in.

Classroom Social Guidance Films

During World War II, the U.S. government relied heavily on filmmaking for the first time to aid in the war effort. Famously, directors like Frank Capra and William Wyler left Hollywood to create pro-Allied propaganda films. Disney and Warner Bros. also contributed cartoons that had some type of training angle or rallied viewers to the cause. The government realized that you could train thousands of soldiers all at once, all across the globe, by showing them a film. The military produced a ton of films on different topics, and one of the most widely seen was Sex Hygiene, directed by John Ford and starring George Reeves of the Superman TV show fame, educating servicemen about how to not get syphilis.

1943 Collier's cartoon

 

Immediately after the war, progressive educators saw an opportunity to use this same idea to benefit kids in school. My cursory understanding of these films before reading the book was that they were a method for enforcing conformity across society, but the truth is far more complex. 

Smith breaks up the bulk of Mental Hygiene into three sections: The Genres, The Producers, and The Films.

The Genres include Fitting In, Cautionary Tales, Dating, Girls Only, Drugs, Sex Education, Bloody Highways, and Sneaky Sponsors. Each genre contains a spectrum from “kinda good” to “mostly ok” to “wow, that’s cringe” to “oh no” to “what the hell did I just watch??”

The Drugs and Bloody Highways categories are the most likely to make your skin crawl. Many of the anti-drug films, which really emerged in the 1960s, rely on exploitative scare tactics and have almost no relation to the reality of drug use. Seduction of the Innocent, for instance, claims that marijuana is a powerful hallucinogenic. That movie’s 11 minutes of full-on batshit crazy. The Bloody Highways collection, which famously scarred generations of drivers-ed students by including real footage of mutilated bodies at accident scenes, is worse. These films remain grisly and disgusting – they are essentially snuff films – and Smith references other reporting that suggests that the producers of these films were giving kickbacks to police and ambulance companies to get out to accident scenes first, and that larger bribery and corruption scandals arose out of those arrangements.

I expected the “Fitting In” and “Dating” categories to be oppressive in their encouragement of rigid conformity, and some of that is definitely there (Control Your Emotions essentially advocates not having any emotions), but I found something else that I didn’t expect – actual good advice.

Isolation, a lack of community, and difficulties making meaningful connections plague our current moment, here in 2025. I have heard countless people online and in person talk about the challenges of just knowing what to do in social situations. What’s expected on a date? Should you pay for your date, or no? Is sex expected, or no? How do you make friends? How do you keep them?  What do healthy relationships look like? Check the YouTube comments on a number of these social guidance films, and you’ll find modern viewers relating to the feelings of these characters and taking comfort in the fact that people have always had these social anxieties.

In Shy Guy, a young Dick York (later of Inherit the Wind and Bewitched) plays a high school student in a new town who loves tinkering with radios and doesn’t know how to make new friends. His father suggests just going to where other students hang out, not making a big deal of it or putting too much pressure on himself, but just putting himself out there where it’s at least possible to meet people. So Dick heads to the hang out at the malt shop or wherever, and watches how people interact. He notices that the people who have the most friends seem to be good listeners, ask questions, and take a sincere interest in other people. This is still good advice. If you meet a new person, you’re much more likely to grow that relationship by asking questions and listening to them than by plowing over them and talking about yourself the whole time.

Other social guidance films, like More Dates for Kay, take this too far. Kay basically knows everything about everybody and constantly reminds every other student she sees about their upcoming tests or doctor’s appointments and everything else, to the complete elimination of her own personality, or any personal wants or needs. So don’t be like Kay. But Dick York thinks everybody will laugh at him fixing radios, until he’s at a party and overhears another kid talking about building a radio. The 1950s didn’t have language for “finding your people,” but that’s basically what Dick does in Shy Guy.

The moral of other films is sometimes totally inscrutable. My daughters and I watched Are You Popular? in which all the boys have gone out with Jenny and so they think she’s a tramp, but they’re all also going out with Caroline every night, and she’s great. We were unable to determine a difference between Jenny and Caroline, or why Caroline wound up at the dance and Jenny wound up standing by a bus bench crying one perfect tear.

Before the rise of the anti-drug scare films, these social guidance films were intended to be a progressive resource for kids, providing them with a framework for understanding expectations in new situations. In the postwar economic boom, millions of Americans were moving from rural to suburban communities, many families had stable economic resources for the first time, and the rise of the automobile and commuter culture were changing the fabric of society. These films were an effort to help kids adapt to new environments, and some actually managed to do so successfully. Some less so. Like Cindy Goes to a Party, where little Cindy’s fairy godmother comes to her in a dream with tips for how to behave at her first party at a friend’s house, including the rock-solid advice, “Don’t Break Things,” which is optically printed onscreen when Cindy looks at a lamp that she presumably would’ve been fine with breaking.

Recontextualizing Conformity

However much fun I had reading this book, though, I don’t want to gloss over the actual, profound effect it had on me and my broader understanding of America in the 20^th century. I have always had an appreciation for both educational and marketing films of the 1950s. Animated educational films from production companies such as John Sutherland (Destination Earth, Rhapsody in Steel, A is for Atom) were produced in partnership with commercial firms and industry groups, while companies like General Motors (Design for Dreaming) made consumerist fantasies designed to sell housewives on new kitchen technology and commuters on the latest automobiles. 

These films were stylistically adventurous, especially the animated ones, and provide a truly unique time capsule of a period where innovation was happening rapidly, and the American middle class was exploding in size. Against the backdrop of the dawning Cold War, the films equate the ideas of American patriotism with being a good consumer, and promise a future of ease and contentment. But until Mental Hygiene, I never fully realized that classroom social engineering films were a distinct category, separate from the types of industrial/educational films I was already familiar with. And it’s the story of these mental hygiene films that really allowed me to recontextualize much of my understanding of the 1950s.

For many people, the prevailing impression of the 1950s that lingers today is one of forced conformity. The image of the nuclear family – the breadwinner father, the homemaker mother, the two clean-cut kids staying out of trouble and getting good grades – is central to the iconography of the era. For too many people, that iconography is the only thing they know of the time. This leads to a misguided sense that “everything was better” in the 1950s – that it was an ideal time we should harken back to and try to somehow recapture. That misunderstanding (or willful misrepresentation) obscures several realities of life at the time (off the top of my head):

• The horrors of segregation and the Jim Crow South
• Polio
• The Red Scare
• The Lavender Scare
• The forced exclusion of almost everyone but white men from the workforce
• The extraordinary prevalence of alcoholism and emergence of medications in pill form (and subsequent rise of both acceptable –  “Mother’s Little Helper” (Valium) to help women forced to stay in the home battle anxiety – and unacceptable – teen – drug abuse)
• The untold levels of trauma in World War II veterans who had returned home
• The collapse of extended family support networks as large corporations began relocating workers to brand new communities around the country
• The unbelievable amount of death caused by motor vehicles that had yet to implement safety protocols, and
• The creeping cultural anxiety of the Cold War and possible nuclear holocaust.

But the successes of the New Deal and the defeat of global fascism (…at the time) created a sense of open horizons and limitless possibilities. Social guidance classroom films played a part in that and presented an opportunity for educators to try to build a better educational system that benefited the children and broader society, as well. The origin of these social guidance films was rooted in progressive education, and an anti-fascist focus on community. These films were largely good-faith efforts to help kids and reinforce a community-centric worldview that had helped defeat the fascist threat in Europe.

But here’s the rub: without anyone realizing it, the world had already moved on.

The people who were making the films – the writers, directors, and educational consultants – had endured all of that history…but the kids had not. These children, the Baby Boomers, were born into maybe the greatest economic upswing in human history, but at school they were being preached a wartime-rationing way of being in the world when it was no longer necessary and General Motors was telling them that to be good Americans they had to be good consumers. 

Even the projectors themselves were products war. The armed forces had pioneered the practice of using films to train thousands of soldiers quickly. The projectors in school classrooms used to play these social guidance films had been used first to train soldiers, and then given to the schools as war surplus. This gave progressive educators what they thought was a golden opportunity to teach kids using these same, industrialized approaches.

Then many of these kids came of age into a draft and multiple, new foreign wars. They'd grown up told by a cartoon turtle to hide under their desks in case the Soviets dropped a nuclear bomb on their town. They were being taught pro-social messages and told that if they followed these rules, they’d be happy, well-adjusted, and they’d fit in. But why? To grow up a drunk like dad, or take Valium like mom, or go fight Koreans and Vietnamese who never did anything to them? 

Traffic Safety films blamed teenagers for the massive fatalities on the road, when it had far more to do with a lack of basic safety features in cars, paired with increasingly powerful engines in vehicles built by manufacturers that didn’t - any of them - have a safety department. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed did what no scare-all classroom film could do – it got Congress to mandate safety features in cars. Only then did traffic fatalities begin to decline. In 1951, the rate of vehicle fatalities per 100 million miles driven was over 7. Since 1991, it's never been above 2. Yet teens had to watch films like Last Date (another Dick York role) that shared the concept of “teenicide,” where kids kill themselves before they can turn twenty by driving recklessly. It’s all your fault, kids!

Sponsored films were sneaky, although sometimes playing an important role. Tampon manufacturers were the only ones willing to make menstruation films, which was a positive, but they did so while promoting their own branded products. Many other companies produced pro-consumer propaganda films hoping schools would show them as educational films and not notice or not mind the product placements. Jam Handy, who was possibly the most prolific producer of these kinds of films, said they were intended “for people whose minds are to be reconditioned.” Oof.

I have to believe that the teenagers of the 1950s and 60s saw through this. The counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s seems inevitable as a reaction to the forced conformity of the 1950s that definitely was emphasized. But learning about these films showed me it’s also possible that the rebellion stemmed also from a generational divide, with parents and children talking past each other against the backdrop of unprecedented economic abundance and ever-intensifying cultural inequality and uncertainty.

The 1950s Indict the 1950s

With all this longing for the halcyon 1950s being so popular these days, it’s valuable to ask what folks in the 1950s thought about all that.

Two films stand out. The first is 1955's The Sound of a Stone, directed by Herk Harvey for Centron Pictures in Lawrence, Kansas. Harvey made hundreds of films for Centron, but is best remembered for directing the ghost story film Carnival of Souls. A careful reading of Carnival of Souls reveals a male director and male screenwriter working in 1962 acutely aware of the hazards young women faced. In the film, Mary begins to experience frightening visions, but they are in some ways depicted as less menacing than the reckless challenges of drag-racing boys on the road, the advances of her aggressive male neighbor, or the powerlessness she experiences as a church organist under the gaze of the pastor, who can throw her out of the congregation and rob her of her livelihood simply for playing the wrong music. I think Harvey picked up this sensitivity by making films for young people in a deeply troubled time.

In The Sound of a Stone, a young English teacher assigns a book to his class, but when a student’s father discovers the name of the book on a list of “subversive titles,” the English teacher and his wife begin suffering under a reign of terror from the community. Soon, even students who worked with the teacher on the school paper are also swept up, and they begin receiving threats. It isn’t commented on, but one of the actors has a severe limp in the film – most likely the result of Polio (see above). Soon the boy’s father actually reads the book he was so quick to condemn, and stands up at a school board meeting and recants. He does the right thing, and everybody learns their lesson about blind censorship the Un=American Activities Committee the McCarthy hearings jumping to conclusions. Or so it seems, until the final scene in the movie when somebody else throws a brick through the teacher’s window, almost hitting his infant son, and letting them know that they’d still better leave town. It remains a genuinely compelling film today, but it’s not uplifting.

Then there’s 1959's What About Prejudice? In this film, none of the other students like the new kid – Bruce Jones. They accuse him of stealing things they misplace, or of starting fights, and attribute his behavior to “his kind,” an idea their parents all reinforce. But then two of the gang crash their car into a bridge, and the only witness to the accident is Bruce, who receives horrible burns all over his body while rescuing the two other kids. This causes the gang to rethink their blind hatred of Bruce, and reflect on how maybe they should’ve looked at Bruce as a person first, and not just as a member of a group they didn’t like. Here’s the conceit of the film, though – as much as Bruce is clearly presumed to be Black, the filmmakers intentionally never show him, so that the audience can insert Bruce into their own personally disfavored group. Maybe Bruce isn’t Black. Maybe he’s Jewish. Or Catholic. Or Hispanic. Or any kind of immigrant. Hell, maybe Bruce just has long hair. The film chooses not to say. The fact that in 1959 the producers of an educational film about prejudice for high schools intentionally didn’t show the object of that prejudice so the audience could fill up that mental space with any number of widespread societal hatreds is itself a horrible indictment of the society that produced it.

Mental Hygiene? Five stars, good book, very fun, thought-provoking. 

The 1950s? One-star, would not go back.   

__

Posted by Vance K - co-founder and cult film reviewer for nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Sometime public service announcement and educational film professional. 

Book Review: A Philosophy of Thieves by Fran Wilde

Fran Wilde’s A Philosophy of Thieves mixes a heist story, a found family story, and a nuanced and considered look at a post-climate-change future story into a readable combination

Roosala Vane lives a double life (at least double). She’s studying at great expense at an academy in New Washington, her technical skills blossoming and growing. In her world, she seeks to become a creator and designer and builder of printed objects (and also, a hacker).  But that is not her own identity. She is really Roo.

Roo is a member of the famous (and infamous) Canarvier troupe. The rich and powerful of this world have a particular game they like to play. They like to hire troupes of thieves to crash their opulent parties and steal from the guests and the estate. These hirings are carefully negotiated as to where and what is out of bounds, and the game is to try and catch the thieves before time runs out. The Canarviers are the best in the business. They don’t get caught, they stay within the contract, they are flashy and showy, and give the guests a good time. But times are tight and they have to take a tricky contract. One that will push Roo to the limit.

And, it turns out, Roo has an identity that she herself doesn’t even know...

Roo’s story is the heart of Fran Wilde’s A Philosophy of Thieves.

The heart of the book is Roo’s drives. She is the engine that keeps the novel going. We start off with a Canarvier heist, but things go wrong from the get go. The leader of the Canarviers, King, is captured. The Canarvier troupe is on the knife’s edge, and Roo not only needs a way to free King, but help keep the Canarviers solvent. And so she agrees to do a gig for Mason Graves and her girlfriend Evangeline Benford. The Benfords are rich and powerful, and the money for the gig could be enough to spring and free King on bail before he is shipped off to Alaska. So Roo is determined to get this gig to go off, get the money, free her mentor, and keep the Canarviers going.

This does not quite go to plan, and the novel delves into a rapidly rising series of improvises, plots, plans (including Mason’s) and the aforementioned identity that Roo is thrust into, very unwillingly. It’s not so much a heist novel as a post-climate-change technothriller that has strong worldbuilding and revolves around family and family relations, and the prices one is willing to pay for their ambitions and dreams.

I do want to say a few more words about Roo, no matter what name you give her. (More importantly, and a subtle point Wilde makes, it’s her for to decide how she names herself.) Roo is an extremely Wilde character that readers of her earlier work will find classic grace notes in. A relatively young woman, intelligent, clever, fierce in all the right ways. Sometimes self-doubting, but always loyal and determined to achieve her ends, which often revolve around her family and those whom she loves and protects. The very forward way Roo moves to try and meet her goals (which are so aligned with others, rather than herself) is endearing and sometimes painful. While we have a good sense of all the characters, especially the alternate POV Mason, Roo is where the heart of this book lies.

But it is the world, no surprise to anyone who has read more than one of my reviews, that really sucked me in and kept me turning pages. Yes, I was engaged strongly with Roo and her plight, struggles and adventures. (I only slowly warmed up to Mason; I kept seeing him as an adversary although he is much more *opposition* than *adversary* to Roo.) But it is the world that we see that is real and developed just enough for us to exert a playground of the imagination.

It’s a world after climate change has had its hammer blow. Seas have risen. Areas everywhere are devastated, to the point that even the atmosphere outside of domed or climate-controlled areas is detrimental to human health. There is a definite social and economic stratification of society in this world: Enclaves, Towns, and then the Skirts, which are definitely a drop in social class, and then the often poisonous and barely habitable regions outside of those. Crossing those regions is dangerous in and of itself, as we see a situation where a crossing goes wrong and leaves some of the characters in a salt flat where, if not rescued, they will absolutely die.

Wilde’s worldbuilding goes far beyond geography and goes into the implications of a post-climate-change world on things large and small. The loss of some of our cultural heritage as the seas rose, and the preciousness by which the rich hoard what they do hoard, is a particularly noticeable beat. And while this is a word of hacking and 3D printing, there are things that are hard and rare to come by. Natural foods like fresh blueberries are a treat only for the rich, grown in a greenhouse at high expense. And this is a world that is disconnected, too. We don’t get a sense of the grand politics (is there a United States still? *Maybe*), but not only are the city-states of this world seemingly semi-autonomous if not even more so (with a heaping side of corporate state politics), but getting to other Towns and Enclaves is mentioned as being difficult even for the ultra-wealthy Benfords.

It’s not something that is ever casually done. This leads more to the idea that this is a fragmented world, where Towns and Enclaves, with their Skirts around, are islands of civilization surrounded by devastation. While the rich and powerful are doing okay, those on more slippery rungs of the ladder need help. This is a society that the rich barely recognize as a society. And yet, while it is not the most pleasant of post-climate-change worlds, but it is one that Roo helps us be convinced is worth trying to save, rebuild and improve.

One interesting bit of worldbuilding and also a way to convey information is the in-world documents that pop up between chapters. Wilde’s excerpts from a digital magazine called Enclave and Towne provide board messages, private feeds, and more. It all feels a bit like Wilde has taken a page from Stand on Zanzibar, although the messages, articles and more are very much hyperlocal. Rather than trying to build out the world beyond the narrative (as we see in the Brunner novel), these documents review, reflect and comment on the action or action-adjacent items. It helps focus and direct the worldbuilding further to the plot and characters, and yet allows us the playground of the imagination that suggests there are plenty more feeds and channels like this we do not see.

I’ve been thinking about expectations lately, where a book’s logline or descriptive text do or do not match the reading experience. And so I want to quote from the promotional materials from the book:

“In these pages, you’ll find aspects of gaslamp fantasy complete with suave lords, charming rogues and high-stakes social events. You’ll find intricately planned and dangerous heists, brought together by a team of sniping but loving family members united around reclaiming their leader and father, King. And you’ll find astute interrogation of climate change and class in the tradition of our most esteemed science fiction.”

This all comes out nicely, except the phrase “gaslamp fantasy” kind of sticks in my craw a bit. Is it that we don’t quite have a good phrase for the kind of SFF that this book is a part of? There used to be, once upon a time, a phrase called “Fantasy of Manners” that was common in some corners of the SFF genresphere... back when it was in paper fanzines and maybe early newsgroups. It’s a mode of SFF that is very social- and class- oriented in nature, and often would deal with these strata of society in one form or another. Wilde’s novel definitely does this in spades, commenting on the very stratified society of her post-climate-change setting. There are a lot of scenes of intrigue, manners and social situations inside of those halls.

It’s not quite steampunk or dieselpunk; the punk is not there, but the aesthetic and feel are there. But can you have it outside of the time period?

The first time I came across this was in Walter Jon Williams’s Drake Maijstral novels, where a minor aristocrat/burglar in a galactic empire where Earth is conquered gets himself into some very funny situations, with social commentary to match. The feel is of this Fantasy of Manners throughout. Also recently, is work such as Malka Older’s Mossa and Pleiti novellas, which are set on space platforms orbiting Jupiter. While the nobles are replaced by academics squabbling and jockeying with each other, the “gaslamp fantasy” feel is there. Novels such as Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit also seem to partake of this sub-sub-genre. But again, can you have gaslamp fantasy set in the future? It’s not a gigantic niche of books, and gaslamp is the closest thing we have to a way to describe it. Gaslamp fantasy may almost set the expectations for the reader, but as a term for novels set out of period, it is a frustratingly incomplete and inaccurate term for novels such as Wilde’s. (A counterpoint: there ARE airships of a sort, even on the cover of the novel itself.)

Genre assignments aside, the novel does feel complete, deliciously done and recommended to all and sundry. However. the ending suggests a potential for future stories, and the back cover has #TheCanarvierFiles. Is there a sequel in the works? If so, I’d read it. Roo, once again, is a main draw, as is the world Wilde has built. I far more associate Wilde with her fantasy than with her SF, and this novel shows that I should recalibrate that association. More, please.

Highlights:

• The strong and abiding main character of Roo, and her struggles with identity, and her drives and needs.
• Vivid commentary by illumination of class, power, and wealth in a post-climate-change society.
• Come for the heists, stay for the worldbuilding.
• This Highlight approved by the Enclave and Towne, Stillwater Edition.

Reference: Wilde, Fran. A Philosophy of Thieves [Kensington Books/Erewhon, 2025].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 2

The Night of the Return of the Revenge of the Attack of Unresolved Mommy Issues

In season 1 of this show, Wednesday Addams solved a murder mystery and saved her school. At the start of season 2, she deals with her unwanted fame by doubling down on her lone genius act, thus antagonizing the allies she ought to be relying on when a new murderer comes to town. The season concludes by showing Wednesday the consequences of her arrogance and putting her on a path toward repairing her strained relationships.

The execution isn't the most elegant, a problem that the show had since the previous season, but the expanded focus on the supporting cast provides parallels to Wednesday's journey that help the clumsy bits of the plot work more smoothly. Wednesday's roommate Enid has been avoiding her first boyfriend because she's afraid of telling him she fell in love with someone else, an unstable situation that resolves with a serving of karmic irony. Their classmate Bianca has been suffering in silence under the blackmail of the new school director, who is forcing her to use her mind control powers to secure donations; her plight gets predictably worse as she continues to refuse to ask for help. And Wednesday's brother Pugsley has been coping with his loneliness by keeping a zombie as a pet, starting a series of events that come back to threaten his whole family for their unhealthy habit of keeping dirty secrets.

The theme is clear: we can't handle everything on our own, and keeping people in the dark only brings more complications. Wednesday herself is the most significant illustration of this idea. She received a psychic vision that said she would cause the death of Enid, and she keeps this information to herself because she underrates Enid's strength and overrates her own. Through the whole season, Wednesday's biggest flaw is her excessive self-reliance. With Enid, she learns of her mistake by literally walking in her shoes. With her mother, Morticia, it takes the rest of the semester. Wednesday has valid reasons to keep strict boundaries with her meddlesome parents, but when lives are at stake, she should admit that her mother is more versed in the occult arts and that there's a precedent of psychic mishaps in her family tree.

Motherly ties are a central axis of this season. Besides the difficulties between Wednesday and Morticia, the latter also has unfinished business with her own mother. Bianca's predicament revolves around keeping her mother away from the influence of a destructive cult. Tyler, the secondary villain of season 1, kills his substitute mother figure, only to reunite with his actual mother, with whom he has a big final fight after she schemes to (symbolically) emasculate him. Even Pugsley, by virtue of accidentally giving life to a zombie, gets thrown into a motherly role at which he fails repeatedly and catastrophically. And to the extent that a severed hand can experience mommy issues, Thing goes through a small identity crisis arc of its own when its original body reappears to reclaim it.

While the character-focused writing is more solid this time (and one always welcomes more scenes with the radiant goddess that is Catherine Zeta-Jones), the first season's bad habit of overcomplicating the plot comes back with a vengeance. The early episodes build up to what promises to be an important antagonist who soon turns out to be a red (-headed) herring and becomes far less interesting from then on. The mysterious flock of ravens that plague the first half of the season are given an underwhelming explanation before being removed from the picture. The cult that had trapped Bianca's mother makes a last-minute reappearance that feels out of nowhere. In total, we meet no less than six separate characters who at some point seem to be this season's Big Bad Boss. Our young heroes are kept so busy investigating and unmaking this tangle of conspiracies that it's no surprise that, once again, this show that is supposedly set in a school doesn't have scenes where they attend classes or do homework.

Finally, there's the issue with the characterization of the Addams family. The show doesn't know whether it wants to portray the Addams as endearing weirdos or heartless sociopaths, so when they join efforts to save one of their own, it's hard to buy that they truly love each other (at one point Wednesday suspects her family will be threatened, and coldly proposes to sacrifice Pugsley; shortly after, he does fall in real danger, and she forgets her own words and jumps to the rescue). Add to this incongruity the family's volatile way of choosing which deaths to care about, and what we get is a tonally scattershot story that is more interested in the spooky aesthetic than in the consequences of dealing with dark forces on a daily basis. You can either tell a silly absurdist comedy where casual cruelty is hilarious and random murders are background noise in the macabre goofiness that defined the '90s films, or tell a crime drama where people's feelings matter, death is taken seriously and family trauma weighs on the protagonists. Aiming for both is trying to have your ant-infested cake and eat it too.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Washington Black

Slavery, steampunk, spirituality and science combine in a unique coming-of-age story about the search for knowledge and family connection

Washington Black is a steampunk-style adventure about Wash, a young Black boy trapped in brutal, violent slavery in 1800s Barbados, whose life is changed by his time with Titch, an idealistic but insecure inventor whose family owns the plantation where Wash is enslaved. The idea of a Disney-esque slave story may give viewers pause, especially with what initially seems to be a guilt savior trope in the premise of the story. However, Sterling K. Brown’s presence (behind and in front of the camera) grounds the story, as does the fact that the series is based on Esi Edugyan's gorgeous Booker Prize finalist novel of the same name. Ultimately, Washington Black is a story of self-determination, community, and creativity in the face of unimaginable odds.

The short, eight-episode series is primarily told in two timelines: childhood flashbacks and adult present in the life of the protagonist. George Washington Black, (wonderfully portrayed by Eddie Karanja), nicknamed Wash, is a ten(-ish)-year-old enslaved child on a brutal plantation in Barbados. He is cared for by Big Kit (Shaunette Renée Wilson), a sturdy enslaved woman who tells Wash stories of her/their original home in Dahomey. The slavemaster, Erasmus Wilde (Julian Rhind-Tutt), is particularly brutal in his abuse of the plantation slaves, leading some to commit suicide. But Kit tells Wash that if they die, they will wake up in their old home in the beautiful Dahomey.

Things change for Wash when Erasmus’s brother, Christopher Wilde (Tom Ellis), arrives at the family’s plantation to work on his invention of a flying machine. He takes an interest in Wash because the child is clever, and is the right size to balance his flying machine. When another plantation family member dies in Wash’s presence, Wash is falsely believed to be the killer, so Titch flees the island with him by using their newly created flying technology. Their journey takes them to many locales and dangerous adventures as Wash grows into a talented engineer and scientist. However, his relationship with Titch struggles under the pressures of their fugitive status and Titch’s own insecurities.

In the present timeline, Wash (Ernest Kingsley Jr.) is now a young man living under a different name in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is mentored by Medwin (Sterling K. Brown), an older Black man who helps former slaves get to freedom and find their place in Halifax’s substantial and multicultural Black community, of which Medwin is the de facto leader. Wash meets Tanna (Iola Evans), a biracial young Black woman who is passing as white and traveling with her white scientist father (Rupert Graves). Wash and Tanna share an interest in science and are attracted to each other despite multiple barriers, including Wash being stalked by a relentless Javert-like bounty hunter (Billy Boyd) and Tanna being trapped in a forced engagement to William McGee (Edward Bluemel), a wealthy young British benefactor with his own strange secret.

There is a lot to like about the series, despite some shortcomings. The fantastical flying machines and other devices that propel the characters to their next adventure add a whimsical feel to the story, which is odd, given the grim premise. Throughout the show there is an appealing contrast and overlay of spirituality and scientific exploration, both of which require faith, imagination, and commitment from Wash. Additionally, we have a classic coming-of-age/journey narrative in the spirit of The Wizard of Oz or The Snow Queen, where Wash travels to new locations on his journey (from England to Dahomey, from the Caribbean to the Arctic) and meets interesting and supportive characters along the way. In particular, he encounters a new member of the African diaspora in each adventure, including a West Indian pirate queen and female warriors in Dahomey. Other important side characters include Gaius (in the past) as the observant, well-spoken, seemingly aloof house slave in Barbados who secretly keeps an eye out for the other enslaved people; and Angie (in the present), who is the sharp-tongued but kind maternal figure who runs the restaurant and who acts as an alternative to Wash’s original maternal figure Big Kit. The collection of diverse but connected characters adds to the fantasy folktale feeling of the story, as does Wash’s spiritual visits with the dead in the spiritual realm, and the implied mystical identity of Wash’s father.

On the other hand, many of the more central and grounded characters are introduced and then abandoned in the later episodes. This is particularly true of Medwin, who seems like a central character both in terms of the show’s narrative structure and in terms of his unwavering mentor relationship with Wash, particularly as an alternative to Titch and Titch’s insecurities. Tanna’s fiancé McGee is another key character whose surprising backstory is intriguing and highly entangled with Tanna and Wash’s relationship. However, he soon disappears from the plot with barely a one-sentence explanation. Tanna and Wash’s courtship progresses at a leisurely pace to the detriment of other key story elements, making the overall pacing of the story uneven, especially in the later episodes.

The abrupt and abbreviated treatment of many of Washington Black’s interesting characters and storylines indicates that a longer series might have created a more interesting exploration of the themes of racism, belonging, identity, betrayal, and scientific curiosity. Fortunately, the series has a satisfying ending that brings Wash’s tale full circle. Washington Black acknowledges the harshness of slavery and racism, but also opts to focus on relationships and optimism and to keep the onscreen violence moderate. This is in contrast to the novel, which has graphic content. As a result, the show is an intriguing confluence of adventure, romance, steampunk technology, and social commentary that is unique in contemporary storytelling and is certainly worth the journey.

Highlights:

• Quirky steampunk tech
• Interesting but underused characters
• An exploration of slavery and racism and self-determination through a PG lens

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: The Conjuring: Last Rites

It isn't exactly scary, but it will appease fans looking for an emotional finale for their horror mom and dad

The first Conjuring movie (2012) is an absolute master class in dread, horror, and freaky vibes. It's not only my go-to spooky movie, it's also one of my favorite films just in general. The other movies in the Conjuring universe—the sequels and movies like The Nun and Annabelle—are kitschy at best, and they're ones I'll rewatch only occasionally. But the o.g. Conjuring is near perfect.

Flashforward to my anticipation of The Conjuring: Last Rites. It's meant to be the conclusion to this fictional film series based loosely on the investigations and experiences of famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. I always take the "based on" with a grain of salt, as ghosts do not exist. The cinematic portrayal of them, however, is extremely likable. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are absolutely delightful as tortured ghost hunters, and their chemistry is palpable. It's rare that you see on-screen characters that seem to truly love each other, and Ed and Lorraine do just that.

What sets Last Rites apart from the other films in the franchise is that this movie is about them and their family, not the tortured families who happen to inhabit deeply possessed buildings and their paranormal struggles. Here, we're in the 1980s, and the Warrens' daughter, Judy, is starting to become embroiled in their investigations. Like her mother, she is also an empath and possesses psychic abilities. As the family becomes concerned when she gets engaged to her boyfriend, Tony, the family is pulled into another paranormal case—this time one that the Warrens first encountered decades ago.

The Smurl family lives in a coal-mining-soaked town in Pennsylvania, and their demon origin story begins with a haunted mirror, one that the Warrens have experienced before. It seems like the setup of every other Conjuring story, yet something is missing. The haunting that's taking place at the Smurl house is creepy, to be sure, but it never really feels threatening. The stakes never feel high. I think this could be because the house is small, and its neighbors are jam-packed around it—there's only about six feet between them. I have strong opinions on what houses work well within the haunted house trope, and these babies need room to breathe. They need at least a few acres or so, and they need isolation. It's why you'll never see a haunted studio apartment or a haunted beach condo. You need to be able to climb a staircase and feel absolutely alone, and hear echoes and shouts from across the building that you can't readily identify.

When it comes to the scares in The Conjuring: Last Rites, there are a couple of good ones, but nothing that stands out like the spooks in the original. You learn the routine pretty quickly: A character is alone, the music stops, and then you get a jump scare of some unidentified demon.

We never learn the backstory of the demons in the Smurl house, unlike the tortured witch Bathsheba in the original. I think this greatly detracts from the emotional heft of the haunting. Turns out the demons lived on the "land" that the house occupies, so the lore is downgraded, and you never feel any stakes. Also, unrelated: One day I will write a paper on haunted houses as a metaphor for working-class people and the failures of capitalism, but today is not that day. It will revolve around how even though a family feels physically threatened, being unable to afford a non-haunted house or even to escape the mortgage of a haunted house is truly the most horrific part of this beloved genre.

You do get Easter eggs throughout the film, however, so hardcore fans of the Conjuring universe will appreciate that. At one point, you see the evil doll Annabelle blown up to 15 feet tall in a scene that made me laugh more than anything else. Speaking of laughter, I saw this movie in 4DX, which is the interactive, shaking-seats-and-gusts-of-wind experience. It is not, in fact, interactive, and it mainly just made me laugh. It takes you out of the experience, especially when the man next to you is shaking and spilling popcorn in his seat.

I wanted very badly to love this movie, as I've mentioned before, because I've been chasing the high of seeing the first Conjuring since 2012. Perhaps it was lightning in a bottle, or maybe I've become so much of a horror movie cynic that I'm incapable of being truly scared. There are moments of true high camp in this, and I found myself laughing more than shuddering despite the multiple different pools of blood, demonic jump scares, and priests hanging themselves.

This movie does work as a denouement to the fictional Warren storyline, though. The characters of Ed and Lorraine, and now Judy, are good people, and you're always rooting for them to save another family, even when they're so ready to be retired. When the Warrens are faced with possession and death, the stakes suddenly become much higher. I did find multiple parts heartwarming, especially towards the end, when they look toward the future and a life without ghost-hunting. If you're not into sentimentality for these characters, you'll be extremely bored at multiple points.

Judy and her boyfriend are (seemingly) set up as perhaps the next generation of demon hunters, but I suppose time will tell. In the meantime, I will be watching the original Conjuring every spooky season like clockwork, when the leaves start to fall and the temps get a little chilly.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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.

Book Review: Hornytown Chutzpah by Andrew Hiller

A light, funny, and audacious novella that relies as much on screwball comedy as it does hard-boiled noir, with more than a dash of Manischewitz wine

Solomon, or Sol the Wise Guy, has a problem. He lives on the borders of Hornytown, which is an annex of Hell that has now popped up in the middle of D.C. He used to work for the police force, but now has gone private. It’s a classic noir setup, except the woman who comes to his office is a demon, and it might be that she actually didn’t kill the Mayor of Hornytown like she said she didn’t. Sol is going to have to load up on a lot of Manischewitz wine. And maybe even stronger stuff, like chicken soup, to deal with what’s arrayed against her... and now, him.

This is the story in Andrew Hiller’s novella Hornytown Chutzpah.

The novella runs on, and will succeed or fail for the reader, on the conceit that the Christian theology is correct, with a few twists. Satan clearly exists, and demons are a thing, and you can really lose your immortal soul or bargain with it. Consecrated food and drink really is your best defense. But Sol is not Catholic, not even Christian. He’s Jewish, so when he goes armed, it is not with holy water and communion wafers; it is with a water gun filled with blessed Manischewitz wine.

In keeping with that, the novella’s tone is a bold genre-splitting mixture of a few influences. First of all, it runs on noir movie beats that anyone who has watched a few of them will recognize. Sol is the classic private detective that you can recognize and love: former police officer, barely making rent, a cupboard existence at best. Enter the femme fatale who needs his help (which is a demon in this case) because no one else can help her. Urrie is depicted perfectly in the role, a demon who may not have actually done the murder that everyone has said she did, but can you actually trust a demon’s word on that? Sol is in over his head, and we are soon on the tracks of the noir story in classic fashion, and the author hits those beats. Of course the cops come immediately on Urrie’s heels, right out of a noir movie. After that, we are plunged into Sol and Urrie having to flee into Hornytown in an effort to clear her name and find out what really happened with the mayor’s death, and who really did it, and why. Sol gets reunited here and there with some old associates, some friendly, some hostile, some neutral, and begins his investigation in earnest. All streets will eventually lead to the Mayor’s residence and the revelation of the true circumstances of his death, but it follows noir beats all along the way.

In addition to the noir beats, there is definitely an undertone of sometimes screwball comedy to the proceedings. Again, keeping in the era that this story throws back to in many respects, this novella owes as much to His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby as it does to The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep. The novella is noir, but it plays a lot for laughs in a light and frothy tone throughout. Sure, we can believe that Sol and his friends are definitely in danger, but it is leavened frequently by strong notes of humor.

And then there is the tone that underlies it all, and really, is what will make this novella work for you or not. It is really the central conceit of the story. Hiller has written it from a strong Jewish perspective that feels a bit like a flanderized and deeply immersed version of NYC-style Jewish culture. I’ve already mentioned the wine, but it goes far deeper than that. Word choice, idiom, Yiddish phrases, and a perspective from entirely within that community prevail in the book from start to finish.

The first paragraph sets the tone for the entire book. Your reaction to this paragraph, in essence, will tell you whether this book could be for you or not. I suspect, given just how out of the usual bounds the novella is, that was precisely the point:

The sheyd passed by my mezuzah like it was a smoke detector without a battery. The furshlugginer thing was supposed to protect the first born, but my dime store tchotchke just blinked blissful ambivalence. Underneath my desk, my toes clenched and unclenched.

Really, what I have said to this point, and that paragraph, tells you whether this story is for you or not. There is a glossary at the end, written casually, to some of the terms and phrases and ideas. I didn’t need it myself, since I grew up in New York and had plenty of contact with the community and many of its members. You can’t live there and not pick up some of it. If you are truly confused, I’d still advise you to not look at the glossary before reading the novella, because it does in fact inadvertently spoil the ending.

Even for it being comedic noir, this worldbuilding the presence of someone who is religious and immersed in a culture that is not the default Christian culture of America¹ is an interesting and clever choice. I suppose you could write this story from the perspective of, say, a devout Italian Catholic, with holy water and communion wine and communion wafers, but it would not be as funny. Spraying holy water on a demon is something that happens all the time in fantasy with a Christian theology. Shooting a demon with a super-soaker full of blessed kosher wine is, as far as I can tell, never been done before in fantasy fiction.² For all of its comedy and playfulness, the novella really does have a strong message about doing good, doing right, and being a good person, regardless of one’s religious trappings. In keeping with that, the novella, I am happy to report, is queer-friendly and inclusive. I think the author may have missed a trick in not making Sol himself queer, but he is following the noir track between Sol and Urrie, so that would have defused and depowered their relationship significantly.

Hornytown Chutzpah, like a good noir movie, keeps the pace lean and mean and knows when to move the plot along so that the story doesn’t flag. Like a screwball comedy, it knows exactly when to hit the comedy beats and when to become more serious (although it leans more toward the former than the latter). And it knows when to hit you in the heart and soul, like a nice bowl of chicken soup from your Bubbe on a cold winter’s day.

At the time of the publication of this novella, it is being funded on Kickstarter.

Highlights:

• Strong fusion of noir, screwball comedy and Jewish humor
• Lean and mean; never overstays its welcome
• For all of its origins, inclusive, modern and welcoming

Reference: Hiller, Andrew. Hornytown Chutzpah (Atthis Arts, projected 2026).

¹ I am not going to say Judeo-Christian, because, in my experience, many who use that phrase are piggybacking on the first part and only mean the latter in practice.

² It does feel like something Poul Anderson could have cooked up with Stainslaw Lem. About the only contemporary author I can think of that would even contemplate a scene like this is Lavie Tidhar.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.