TV Review: Talamasca

The world’s most clueless spy, working for the world’s most ineffective spy agency… what could go wrong?

Our guy has a problem: his name is Guy. This show’s lack of imagination only gets worse from there.

Guy has another problem: he can hear other people’s thoughts, but the universe conspires to put him in the presence of either so many people that telepathy is too painful to use, or one person who is specially trained or magically gifted to resist it, so he’s that supremely irritating type of protagonist who has an awesome superpower that is of no use ever.

As it turns out, Guy’s life has been watched and orchestrated by the secret order of the Talamasca, who recruit people like him to keep tabs on the hidden supernatural world. The theory is that collecting data on vampires, witches, ghosts and demons (the series is set in the same universe as Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches) will help normal humans keep a reasonably peaceful life alongside so many warring superhuman factions. The reality is that the magical police is incapable of keeping its own house in order and its hierarchy is a tangled mess of betrayal and backstabbing enabled by jaw-dropping incompetence.

Welcome to the worst spy agency I’ve seen since Get Smart.

Our guy Guy is played by a too distracting Nicholas Denton, who, in fairness, isn’t to blame for looking so much like the spitting image of Eddie Redmayne that one forgets to listen to what he’s saying—not that he has much to comment on, what with the absurd level of secrecy his boss likes to maintain. Said boss, who goes by Helen, is a veteran spy and a master of the art of posing dramatically and giving a knowing smile as a substitute for having anything useful to say.

Helen has been the one in charge of steering Guy’s life from behind the scenes, preparing him for the right time to recruit his psychic talents in the neverending mission of keeping humankind safe. Nevermind that she never does anything to earn Guy’s trust; every one of his questions gets slammed down with the promise that all will be revealed in due time, which I guess is intended to be in the middle of season 4.

Because there’s apparently an urgent crisis going on, Helen gives Guy a crash course in spycraft (inexplicably, the course doesn’t include a lesson on “Don’t Read Your Spy Textbook in Public Transportation”), and sends him on his own across the pond to listen to the thoughts of a powerful vampire who has infiltrated the British branch of the Talamasca. On his first day in London, Guy fails at basic spying and hooks up with the first woman who makes eyes at him. One has to wonder why the spy textbook didn’t cover this kind of scenario.

Guy is supposed to be provided with a mentor/handler, who is alarmingly absent during most of the mission, and when it’s finally time to go looking for the big bad vampire, Helen refuses to make any plan. She basically tells him, “You’re smarter than any plan I could give you. You’ll think of something.” With this dismal neglect from his superiors, it’s no wonder that he turns against the Talamasca at the first opportunity.

Even before that, he seems to devote more effort to spying on his boss than on the vampire. He has valid reasons to resent the ways the Talamasca has meddled in his life since childhood, and when he discovers that his mother was also some form of spy, and that she and the agency parted ways in bad terms, any hope of retaining his loyalty is lost. But the side he chooses instead cares even less for his personal gripes, his lack of experience, or his continued existence. At times I wondered whether this series was supposed to be a comedy, because Guy speedruns through one disastrously bad choice after another, somehow making it way past the point where he should have already been dismembered by vampires several times.

The show’s aim appears pointed at feeling mysterious rather than narrating a mystery. We’re told that the magic police has vast resources, but when they task a complete noob with undoing a vampire conspiracy, they don’t equip him with as much as a cove of garlic. We’re told that the world has vampires, witches, ghosts and demons, but we only ever see vampires, and in the rare scenes that feature a witch coven, they don’t do anything particularly witchy, so they may as well be a hippie commune. We’re told that the order is ancient and has tentacles everywhere, but across the season we meet at most the same half dozen top operatives, which gives the impression that we’re watching a school play with zero budget.

As for the mystery of the season, it’s admittedly a clever one, but getting there is an ordeal, even with just six episodes. Someone has destroyed the centuries-old archives of the Dutch branch of the Talamasca, which should severely cripple the order’s ability to keep tabs on the supernatural world, but we don’t see any serious consequence. Out of earshot of her colleagues, Helen has been searching for something called The 752, which sounds like the name of a chemical weapon, or a model of missile, or a limited edition comic book. Whatever it is, it has immense power, so it must not fall into the wrong yadda yadda, or else the world will yadda yadda. And it just so happens that the person closest to finding it is the same vampire our guy Guy has to follow. Neat!

Oh, have I already mentioned that the season’s two-part premiere has not one but two fridged women? You know, for extra drama.

I haven’t watched the TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, but the praise I’ve heard about it has been consistently enthusiastic. This spinoff, on top of being mediocre on its own merits, does a shameful disservice to a beloved story.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, book 3: City of Dragons

Memory defines dragons and Elderlings, but humans need less of it

When last we left our intrepid band of misfits, they had finally arrived at the lost city of Kelsingra. The dragons have needed to put aside their ideas of what makes a traditional dragon in order to recover the core of what draconic characteristics remain to them. No more can they rely on dignity and inherited memory if they want to fly. They must work, human-like, to develop abilities that once came effortlessly to them as their birthright. Like humans, what they become is a function of what they, as individuals, put into it, not what their ancestors, as dragons, have bequeathed them in inherited memories.

But if the first two books follow the dragons’ journeys to learn human skills and develop a more cooperative, human-like society, City of Dragons allows humans the opposite opportunity. Kelsingra is an intact Elderling city, and one key component of such cities is the heavy use of memory stone to save or record the thoughts and experiences of the inhabitants. Some of this is useful: it’s nice to know how to work the hot baths and lighting. But a lot more than functional infrastructure is recorded in these memory pillars, and not all those recordings are safe for humans to experience. Those former lives are glamourous and addictive, and too much indulgence can overwhelm a person’s identity, leaving them more like a ghost of the original bearer of the memory than their own person. Such is the case of Rapskal, whose own identity of a cheerful, dopey, optimistic, childlike teenager becomes entirely erased and replaced by an arrogant, martial Elderling whose memories ensnare him beyond his ability—or conscious desire—to resist.

For dragons, these ancestral memories form a core part of their identities, Without them, they are less draconic than they should be. But for humans, these ancestral memories are a threat to their own individual identities. It is not an accident that it is only Elderlings—those humans who have been changed by close association with dragons—are the ones who indulge in memory stone. This component of Elderling magic is not arbitrary. It is a reflection of dragons’ tendency to make their Elderlings like them. We see this tendency on the small scale with Sintara and Thymara. Sintara transforms Thymara into an Elderling with wings, but the wings are purely decorative, an expression of art rather than function. Sintara claims that this was the intention the entire time, but surely it’s no accident that Thymara’s wings remain purely decorative as long as Sintara herself is earthbound. One of Rapskal’s last acts as his own identity is encouraging Thymara to try to fly anyway. She has wings. Wings are for flying. He got Heeby to fly, and he is confident that he can do the same for Thymara.

So, as with decorative or functional wings, so it is with memory: dragons remake Elderlings in their image, and a core part of what they are is stored and shared ancestral memories. And this fundamental artificiality of what Elderlings are—where “artificial” means both not natural, and also a work of artifice, of intentional art—does dampen, somewhat, the glory of Elderlings that we’ve been taught to revere as something lost and wonderful throughout this entire series. Even the images of Kelsingra at its former height cannot be properly mourned as a vanished heritage, because there are hints that, even when the Elderlings and dragons were at their grandest, Kelsingra was still a city of memories. It was never full of bustling magic, alive and magnificent. It was always half-populated by ghosts; its wonders were always just a veneer of lives laid over memories of other lives. The apparent richness came from the layering, not reality.

It’s tempting to make a simple dichotomy here: with dragons, losing ancestral memories and being forced to develop individual identities human-like is a catastrophic loss. With humans, gaining ancestral memories at the expense of individual identity is equally bad. And certainly, watching Rapskal’s gentle dopiness become overwritten by an alien, long-dead personality feels like a similar loss. It is a loss. But Hobb would never let something as simple as good-for-dragons-but-bad-for-humans structure her plot. The loss for the dragons tempers their arrogance, and forces their partnership with humans into something slightly more equitable than it had been previously. In parallel, gaining those memories allows Rapskal and Thymara to access the skills that came with those memories. To jump ahead into the last book for just a moment, Rapskal’s acquired ability to lead military attack is useful in an encounter with Chalced (sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced), and Thymara’s acquired memory of Kelsingra’s infrastructure maintenance allows her to restore the well of Skill that is so vital for the dragons’ well-being. In moderation, then, the cross-pollination of humans and dragons can build greatness.

I will still always mourn, however, the realization that the Elderlings themselves relied on a palimpsest of ghosts.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. City of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2012].

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, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Contributor Profile: Gabrielle Harbowy

NAME: Gabrielle Harbowy

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: East of Los Angeles, West of the Moon

NERD SPECIALIZATION(S): Interviewer, tattoo fanatic, TTRPGer, Team Star Wars. Totally normal about Baldur's Gate 3.

MY PET PEEVES IN NERD-DOM ARE: many and varied. How much time do you have?

VAMPIRES, WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ALIENS OR ROBOTS: Astarion Ancunín specifically. In this essay I will...

RIGHT NOW I'M READING: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

...AND A COUPLE BOOKS I RECENTLY FINISHED ARE: A House Between Sea and Sky by Beth Cato, A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith ... and some fantastic books by clients (I'm a literary agent) that I can't talk about yet, but believe me I'll be crowing proudly about them when you can read them!

NEXT TWO ON QUEUE ARE: Final Orbit by Chris Hadfield, Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

WHEN THE WEATHER SUCKS OUTSIDE I'M MOST LIKELY TO BE... Curled up under a homemade blanket with a book and a mug of tea. No...I'll be at my desk reading queries.

MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO: Does Dana Scully count?

IF I WERE A SUPERHERO/VILLAIN, MY POWER WOULD BE: Regulating the air temperature around me. Always comfortable in all situations!

THE BEST / WORST COMIC FILMS OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: I think it's been longer than that since I've seen one. I'm happy that other people enjoy them! I get my nerd-fix elsewhere.

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS AWESOME: Del Toro's Frankenstein

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS TERRIBLE: the nightly news

EVERYONE SHOULD SEE XXXX BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE: the aurora borealis (or aurora australis), with their own eyes.

BEST SCIENCE/SPECULATIVE FICTION SHOW OF THE PAST 10 YEARS: Severance and Mrs Davis both hit me right in the feels.

NAME A BOOK YOU *NEED* A MOVIE OF (OR VICE VERSA): I need a movie of Aether's Pawn by Gabrielle Harbowy so that I can retire comfortably.

Welcome Gabrielle!

Film Review: Zootopia 2

The city of talking animals reveals a wider world in its past and its future

Some movie premises, like “How did Han Solo get his last name?”, can be classified as “Nobody asked for this.” Others, like “How did the rebels get the Death Star schematics?”, are in the smaller category of “Nobody asked for this, but now that you went ahead and made it, it turns out it’s really good.” Zootopia 2 belongs in that latter category. There was no need to explore why we didn’t see reptiles in the first movie, because the class of mammals sufficed for its predator/prey allegory (also, the vast majority of reptiles are predators, so their presence would only have overcomplicated the plot).

(Also also, the talking animals eat fish. Are the fish sentient? Don’t ask.)

The worldbuilding of the first Zootopia was only as detailed as it needed to be, and that’s OK; that’s how storytelling is supposed to work. But now that Disney has decided to answer an unnecessary question, we’re lucky that the result is as good as it is. Zootopia 2 takes the first movie’s points about exclusion and prejudice and weaves a bigger mystery that involves racism, real estate encroachment, and the erasure of the history of marginalized communities.

Our protagonist duo is back: Judy, the overachiever rabbit with a compulsive need to prove herself caused by the mother of all impostor syndromes; and Nick, the socially isolated fox who only became Judy’s coworker because he literally has no other friends. (This is not me roasting them; the script has them explicitly saying this.) So, after a spectacularly disastrous unauthorized mission, they’re quickly ordered to get support group therapy to address the rough edges between them.

As it happens, this is a tense moment for the police department: the city of Zootopia is celebrating the centennial of its climate control walls that allow camels and polar bears to coexist. This is the pivotal invention that makes Zootopia and its marvelous diversity possible, and to highlight their importance, the exclusive gala that commemorates their creation also has a priceless historical document in display: the design notes of the engineer who designed the walls. The notebook has been preserved by a distinguished lynx family that for some reason is hostile to one of its descendants, Pawbert, who seems to not measure up to the patriarch’s expectations.

The plot kicks into gear when a viper crashes the party, steals the notebook, rapidly delivers a speech that convinces Judy of his good intentions, and ends up accidentally envenoming the police chief in a comically contrived set of circumstances that make it look like Judy and Nick were the attackers. So now our heroes have to go on the run from their own colleagues while they try to solve the mystery of why a reptile has showed up in Zootopia after a century of absence, why the lynx family is so suspiciously hostile to him, and what the design notes have to do with it all.

As police investigations go, this one doesn’t rely on brilliant deduction as much as miraculous convenience. For our heroes, clues fall from the sky as needed; the only doubt is whether they’ll survive the next slapstick chase through a swamp or a water pipe or a collapsing house or a Gazelle concert in the desert.

A handful of characters from the first movie make an appearance in the sequel: your favorite criminal sheep, donut-loving cheetah, car racing sloth, hyperanxious rabbit parents, and mobster shrew return for brief yet memorable scenes. The new characters are no less vivid: the new mayor of Zootopia is a former action movie actor horse with a hilarious catchphrase, one of the key informers in the investigation is a plumed basilisk with a perverse sense of humor, and one unlikely ally our heroes meet is a tomboyish beaver with a conspiracy podcast. And of course, the star that steals the show is Gary the viper, voiced with endearing sweetness by a perfectly cast Ke Huy Quan.

The day is saved by generous emotive oversharing, multi-species cooperation, rusty electrical equipment, the magic of snake antivenom, and… the Zootopia patent office? OK, a bit bureaucratic, but I’ll take it. The reveal of why reptiles left Zootopia and why mammals have such a low opinion of them has echoes in the real-world history of forced displacement and the insidious normalization of racism. It’s heartening to learn the true extent of reptile contributions to animal society, but it may deliver a mixed message to have a plot where reptiles are only welcomed back into Zootopia because they contributed to animal society. As a matter of principle, a group of people shouldn’t have to show proof of noble deeds before getting basic dignity and equality.

Zootopia 2 shows us a more complex side of its society, a deeper manifestation of the disguised prejudices that were already evident in the first movie. Even if the specifics of the story could have been planned better, the basic message of joy in diversity resonates loud and clear.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Contributor Profile: Eddie Clark

NAME: Eddie Clark.

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: The bottom right corner of the map, if we have in fact been included on it.
 
NERD SPECIALIZATION(S): SFF books. Video Games. Anime. The intersection of gay shit with all 3.
 
MY PET PEEVES IN NERD-DOM ARE: The Hugo Award for Best Novella from Tor. Books which don’t trust the reader to do the slightest bit of work. Mistaking aesthetic preference for for moral valence.
 
VAMPIRES, WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ALIENS OR ROBOTS: Alien Vampires.
 
RIGHT NOW I'M READING: The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh.

…AND A COUPLE BOOKS I RECENTLY FINISHED ARE: A Tangle of Time, by Josiah Bancroft. The Door on the Sea, by Caskey Russell. The Effaced, by Tobias Begley.

NEXT TWO ON QUEUE ARE: Notes from a Regicide, by Isaac Fellman. Seventhblade, by Tonya Laird.

WHEN THE WEATHER SUCKS OUTSIDE I'M MOST LIKELY TO BE… on the couch. Either book or controller in hand.

MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO AND SUPER-VILLAIN ARE: My answer to this will vary over time. This month: Kid Juggernaut and Mysteriant respectively (Anthony Oliveira’s run on Avengers Academy is a thing of queer beauty; do check it out).

IF I WERE A SUPERHERO/VILLAIN, MY POWER WOULD BE: Sending anyone to sleep instantly. I’d mostly use it on myself.

THE BEST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Probably haven’t seen an western comic adaptation in the past five years! But the Netflix limited series adaptation of Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto in 2023 was spectacularly good.

THE WORST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Happily for the genre, I really don’t have one to offer!

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS AWESOME: Kowloon Generic Romance—pitch perfect vibes, well produced, casually queer, and didn’t take any easy exits. 

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS TERRIBLE. Star Trek: Section 31. Did not understand what Star Trek is. Didn’t understand character. Bleh.

EVERYONE SHOULD SEE XXXX BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE, Run, don’t walk, to whatever distribution is available in your country and watch the superb SF black comedy Creamerie. Funny, sharp, and bleak.

BEST SCIENCE/SPECULATIVE FICTION SHOW OF THE PAST 10 YEARS: The Expanse.

NAME A BOOK YOU *NEED* A MOVIE OF (OR VICE VERSA): A Merchant Ivory adaptation of A Mourning Coat by Alex Jeffers would be amazing.

Welcome, Eddie!

Book Review: We Who Hunt Alexanders by Jason Sanford

A dark fantasy contemplation of family, and monsters, and darker subjects still.

Amelia lives with her mother. Driven out of their village into the big city of Medea, they live on the edges of society. Amelia and her mother have special... dietary needs. Dietary needs that cause them to pursue and hunt a particular two legged sort of prey. For, you see, Amelia and her mother are both monsters. Rippers, specifically. Rippers are monsters who hunt a particular kind of man called Alexanders.

This is the story of Jason Sanford’s We Who Hunt Alexanders, a dark fantasy novella.

The novella is set in a somewhat fantastical version of our own real world, in the imaginary city of Medea, in a county that is never named, but feels like from context and clues like an analogue of Great Britain during the Victorian or maybe early Edwardian Age (Amelia, it turns out, loves to read penny dreadfuls). With that set up, Sanford plunges us immediately into the nature of Amelia and her mother, what rippers do and how they do it. And quickly from there sets up the conflicts and themes of the novella. The novella is a lean and mean story that stays in Amelia’s point of view throughout.

The novella makes Sanford’s theme explicit from the get go: Rippers are monsters who only hunt men, and only men who have or do commit violence, the Alexanders.¹ The Rippers, it turns out, cannot actually hunt men who haven’t taken that violence into their heart, that violence into their hands. Amelia and her mother are in a new age (and we learn that her mother is old, and dying, and of another age). In this world, there are almost too many Alexanders, and they are too powerful to reduce their numbers. Amelia, young and uncertain and not yet strong, grows into her own. In addition to that coming of age story, Amelia slowly begins to realize she is different from her mother, different from other Rippers in fact. And as her mother slowly weakens, the outside threat that hunts them both comes to the fore: Bishop Stoll. He is, in the parlance of the novella, an incendiary : a man who stirs up anger and hatred and violence on a large scale but is not directly an Alexander himself. They convince others to do their bidding, or others are inspired by the incendiary to actually turn Alexander themselves.

The problem for Amelia’s mother is that since Stoll is NOT an Alexander, they cannot attack and harm him, and actually suffer physical consequences in trying to do so. Part of the genius of Sanford’s writing is in the antagonist of Stoll. Not only is he an incendiary and not an Alexander, he is genre-savvy enough and knowledgeable enough to know about Rippers... and about their limitations. And is willing to use those weaknesses against Amelia and her mother, as needed. There is a gloating intelligence and cleverness and evil to Stoll that shows his dark charisma not only to his followers but to the reader as well.

And given Stoll’s charisma, and his backing of the church, he is an existential threat to Amelia and her mother. Not only are there now too many powerful Alexanders to try and control, but these Alexanders, led by Stoll, have other targets. Not necessarily the other monsters (we learn and meet a vampire in the course of the novella) but Stoll sets his sights on disrupting and destroying an underground gay bar. In the course of the novella, Amelia, who has made friends with the owners and a frequenter at the bar (as well as come to an accord with a Ripper who spends time there), Amelia finds her friends and colleagues in the course of Stoll’s persecution and rage. While Stoll is genre-savvy as noted above, and wants to deal with and extirpate Rippers at all times, Stoll and his followers have this broader “culture war” target in mind. The framing is obvious and direct: Stoll sees queer folk as monsters, and to be dealt with as such. But of course, since Stoll himself is not an Alexander, merely the leader of many Alexanders, the still inexperienced Amelia and her weakening’s mother’s opposition to Stoll is necessarily fraught and perilous.

It was fascinating, taking apart the concept, once I had read it, and thinking about it. Rippers specifically target male purporters of violence. Could a ripper target, say, a female serial killer? As I further thought about it and the limitations of the food supply of Rippers, or, instead, their target base, I went again to the theme of the novel. The novel is an indictment of how male violence is institutionalized in modern society, how there are many Alexanders, and worse, as in the case of the Bishop, those who do not commit violence themselves, but instead whose words and actions incite others to commit violence. Parallels to contemporary society, and contemporary leaders come to mind and its not a big leap to see how Sanford’s Victorian world resonates with the modern day and its own problems. One can also see the transphobia rampant in modern society today as the modern inspiration for this world’s Stoll’s crusade against queer members of society, making them monstrous (like the “real monsters” Amelia and her mother and rippers and vampires are).

And there are strong themes of family and found family in the novella too. Amelia and her dying mother of course, but also the humans that they live with, the aforementioned vampire, other rippers and the sense of community in the bar. Families come in all shapes and sizes in this novella with intersecting and interesting memberships and interactions. All of these families are under threat by the Alexanders, one way or another, and grow and change as those interactions intensify as the novella progresses.

The ending of the novel, then, as Amelia finally grows into her own abilities and in fact proves herself a different sort of ripper, is one where Sanford is addressing, through the medium and milieu and the nature of this different sort of ripper, the limitations of the original ripper variety. That is to say, the limitations of old ways of combating and opposing hatred in society. Amelia represents a fantastical version and answer that points to the need in our own society for different and broader solutions to societal problems. Amelia shows that retail response to a societal problem is insufficient, and for real change and growth to occur, in this modern worlds, other, deeper solutions are needed. Amelia’s mother’s solutions are insufficient in the modern age, her encounter with the Bishop proves that. Amelia points to a potential future.

So I don’t think that is a horror novella, and is definitely much more of a dark fantasy. There are dark subjects here, sexism, queerphobia, domestic violence. One might say that Sanford himself is being provocative and incendiary in this novella in tackling these subjects, so for those who wish to avoid these subjects, this novella is probably not for you. The fantastical nature of rippers and how they kill does mitigate the impact of the violence, it's not in excruciating realistic detail. But this is a story of monsters who hunt other monsters and are hunted in turn.

There is probably a whole additional piece to be written in reading this in concert and parallel with Crista’s story in Plague Birds. Sanford clearly is still hitting the themes of Plague Birds, from a somewhat different voice , but the same strong storytelling and characterization. Consider, Crista becoming a plague bird in the titular novella, and what plague birds are expected to do, and contrast with Amelia, growing into her role and identity as a ripper. While Amelia was never human, and Crista was thrust into the role, one can see rippers and plague birds as two varieties of Erinyes that Sanford has created. To put it in musical terms, Sanford is building a fugue with this theme, with Plague Birds and We Who Hunt Alexanders as the canons, not identical but clearly in dialogue with each other, as voices in that fugue.

I look forward to more voices in Sanford’s fugue of resistance and response to violent patriarchy and the forces that nurture it.

¹ The etymology of Alexanders is something that Amelia herself wonders about and we do get an answer, but it’s a lovely bit of worldbuilding that I am not going to spoil. 

--

Highlights:

• Strong themes of found family, fighting against institutional violence and patriarchy.
• Vividly imagined central problems for main character: coming of age, uncertain of abilities even as their mother is clearly dying
• Rippers as strongly imagined Agents of Vengeance-- not the first use of the idea by the author.
• Stands strongly with author’s previous work.

Reference: Sanford, Jason, We Who Hunt Alexanders (Apex, 2025)

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

Contributor Profile: Maya Barbara

NAME: Maya Barbara

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: Nestled somewhere between two major cities in West and Middle Tennessee 

NERD SPECIALIZATION(S): horror, literary fiction, narrative essays, comics, anime/manga, vampires, movies, hyperspecific pop culture moments that is special to gay women specifically, pop music

MY PET PEEVES IN NERD-DOM ARE: gatekeepers, poorly written plot twists, unearned quips, mean horror movies, acting like genres were just born out of tiktok

VAMPIRES, WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ALIENS OR ROBOTS: Vampires, duh.

RIGHT NOW I'M READING:

Beneath the Trees Where No One Sees: Rites of Spring by Patrick Hovarth

Pure Innocent Fun by Ira Madison II

...AND A COUPLE BOOKS I RECENTLY FINISHED ARE: 

Aggregated Discontent by Harron Walker

The Chromatic Fantasy by H.A.

The Grimmorie Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis

NEXT TWO ON QUEUE ARE: 

I Was A Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

WHEN THE WEATHER SUCKS OUTSIDE I'M MOST LIKELY TO BE... in bed, rotting away with either a movie or a book.

MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO AND SUPER-VILLAIN ARE: Batman and Magneto 

IF I WERE A SUPERHERO/VILLAIN, MY POWER WOULD BE: telepathy because Jean Grey is iconic.

THE BEST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Across the Spider Verse

THE WORST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Thor: Love and Thunder (UGH!)

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS AWESOME: I just watched Love Bites (1988), a softcore gay romcom created by porn vets, and it was awesome.

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS TERRIBLE: I just watched Prom Night (1980) and it was terrible because no one died for an HOUR. 

EVERYONE SHOULD SEE XXXX BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE: Everyone should see Interview With The Vampire (2022) before it’s too late. 

BEST SCIENCE/SPECULATIVE FICTION SHOW OF THE PAST 10 YEARS: It’s going to be Interview With The Vampire (2022) I fear.

NAME A BOOK  YOU *NEED* A MOVIE OF (OR VICE VERSA): YELLOWFACE BY R.F. KUANG. I’m DYING for a A24/Neon level adaptation of it! It’s tailor made for it!

Welcome Maya!