Either her husband is crazy, or he is lying, or he is telling the truth and can really communicate with spirits of the deceased. Each possibility is more frightening to Evelyn than the prior, for she holds a dark secret that Robert or his Spiritualist medium companions might discover from a ghost and memory that still haunts her.
There are some rather lovely ideas and bits here, especially in the extensive worldbuilding. The arguments over the geometry and topography of hell are fascinating. But the ultimate ending as well as what the novel builds up to feels underwhelming. It builds to a conclusion that really didn’t match up with what the novel seemed to be trying to do. I enjoyed parts of the journey far more than the destination itself.
Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and Craig (Jordan Gavaris) are two Millennial (Gen Y) friends/roommates who slip through life in a codependent relationship that avoids past trauma or current responsibility in shared coping mechanisms of alcohol, vaping, and dark humor. Until Joey meets the bizarre and entrancing Brian, a tracksuit-wearing self-professed extra-terrestrial who can calm Joey’s anxiety with a simple touch. Brian tells Joey that he is an orphan and refugee from a planet lost to climate change, but that he brought with him special trees that will help rescue Earth before it is too late. Joey rapidly falls under Brian’s seductive spell, until a moment of intense tentacle-filled cross-species sex drives her from him in fear. Joey relates this story in an engrossing, almost-ten minute monologue that opens Touch Me (2025) as the camera slowly zooms in on Joey’s face as she responds during a psychiatry session to her therapist’s suggesting of combating anxiety with absurdity. Then the film gets weirder.
Platform Decay, which will be published on May 5, is the eighth book or novella in The Murderbot Diaries (there are a few short stories, too) by Martha Wells. It’s a fun extension of the series, but I strongly advise against coming in cold, without having read most of the series, or at least having watched the Apple TV show that’s based on it. The book starts in the middle of another infiltration mission, but we don’t find out the objective until halfway through the third chapter. So if you don’t already know a lot about Murderbot and its universe, you’ll be lost.
From 1939 until 1975 Spain existed under the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, general of the Nationalist forces during the preceding Spanish Civil War. For close to four decades Spanish citizens lived under an oppressive, authoritarian regime that governed in cooperation with the National Catholic Church to promote and enforce a conservative Roman Catholic society and to censor or suppress anything deemed transgressive and deviant. Absolute state control extended into artistic endeavors such as film production and release. However, by the early 1970s an aging ruling system and Franco’s waning health emboldened voices and action of dissent and resistance, including filmmakers who were able to start pushing against the limitations of state censors, at least in cuts of films produced in Spain for release in foreign markets (national cuts for release in Spain remained heavily censored.) Upon Franco’s death in 1975 the floodgates of suppressed societal emotion opened, relaxing censorship more as the nation tried to find political footing in a post-Franco reality. Depictions of violence and sex in films increased, both for their own transgressive sake under new freedoms and to use for exploration/reckoning with atrocities going back to the Spanish Civil War and past, events that were all but ‘erased’ from mention under the fascist state. By 1977 in this Transition period, the political powers in control decide to create an “S” classification rating system to label films being released that might offend public sensibilities. After decades of suppression, most of the Spanish public seemed to crave all the “S” classified films they could get. A label meant to be stigma quickly became a badge of honor and guaranteed commercial success whether simple titillation or provocative artistic works. Eroticism and horror flourished in particular. Plots could now include criticism of Catholicism or the State, painful historical memories avoided could now be confronted. Characters outside ‘traditional’ family structure or heterosexuality could be included.
The publisher’s description of Cheri Radke’s novel, An Accident of Dragons, makes it sound like a romp: “An unlikely lord finally meets a problem he can’t flirt his way out of in this adventurous and light-hearted queer cozy fantasy featuring pirates, dragons, kidnapping, tea, and other high-fantasy delights…” It mostly is, and it’s a lot of fun, but there are also touches of long-set sorrow and suppressed issues that ended up having to be faced. So rather than just being cotton candy, there’s some meat on the bones of this story. Tasty, tasty meat.
