All of Us Strangers gets many of the contours of its paranormal influenced, slightly off balanced setting and some of its major plot beats from the 1987 novel, translated from Japanese, Strangers, by Taichi Yamada. While there are significant details changed—like replacing the book’s Kei, the woman that the main character, Hideo, falls for after his divorce, with Paul Mescal’s Harry—most of the film’s worldbuilding and skeleton is lifted from the novel. Haigh’s cherry-picking of the book might also explain some of the inconsistencies that have left viewers so confused. Many details from the book appear haphazardly applied to Haigh’s altered version of the novel decontextualized and adrift from their original intended plot functions.

            Typically, in a fantasy world, even one closely resembling the modern day, there are certain rules that are established to allow the viewer to understand altered aspects, like how magic can be wielded. These rules give the viewer expectations and create the limitations the narrative has to work within. There is an unspoken contract with the viewer that these rules, once established, will be obeyed, and breaking them at the end to manufacture a finale typically leads to soured feelings on the entire project. All of Us Strangers, either intentionally or by accident, does not offer the viewer a coherent set of narrative promises, ends with a final reveal that should be utterly infuriating, and is incredibly difficult to decipher, even after multiple re-watches. Yet, I’d still recommend the movie to anyone.

            From early on, its apparent that while resembling present day London, there’s something not entirely normal about the apartment block that Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal) reside in. While establishing Adam’s lonely existence as a single screenwriter living in a high rise, subsisting on gross, stale take-out, the fire alarm goes off. Adam exits the building without concern as he takes the elevator down. While he waits outside, he looks back at the building’s tower of darkened windows, seeing only one illuminated where Harry smirks down at him, clearly unconcerned by the regular false fire alarms. In later dialogue when Harry visits Adam’s door, drunk, knowing exactly where he lives despite the two not seeming to know one another, it’s confirmed that they are the only two residents of the massive apartment block.

            The next morning, Adam sits down to start his screenplay about his family, describing the year and exterior shot that is mimicked when Adam heads back to his hometown. When he arrives, the house appears rundown and abandoned. While wandering through the nearby park, though, Adam encounters his father, looking exactly how he did before he died decades ago. When Adam returns home with his father (Jamie Bell), the house is restored to its former glory, and he is warmly received by his mother (Claire Foy).

They’re incredibly excited to catch up with Adam and learn about his life since they died in a tragic accident when he was a child. This establishes a direct relationship with the paranormal, though it’s unclear how Adam manages to cross the threshold into their world, whether he accesses it through a transformation on the train ride or by stepping into some cosmic ripple. Each time he returns to his apartment from a visit with his parents, his regular life appears unchanged. Even before probing the anomalies that arise around Harry, it’s clear that Adam has somehow accessed an altered state where he can interface with ghosts.

Spoilers Start

            While it’s unclear where Adam exists on the spectrum of life and death, there are a number of theories that I’ve formulated about Adam’s state throughout the film. There are clues to support each theory, and there are also clues that directly contradict all of them. This is the problem with definitively untangling the threads of this movie. Does Adam simply start seeing dead people at a random point in his middle age, convenient for the movie to begin? Or is there something deeper allowing him access to his parents and also Harry—who is revealed to have died at some point in the movie, as Adam discovers his body during the twist ending. While much has been made of how long Harry was dead in the timeline of the film, the question of Adam’s status is, to my mind, the more essential one.

            One theory, perhaps the flimsiest, is that Adam has simply written the events, as he’s seen progressively working on his screenplay throughout the film. He seems to be writing about his parents, and digging through his old family memory box triggers their first encounter, or, at least, his visit home. Perhaps he falls too deeply into his work and loses touch with reality.

While this doesn’t address Harry and their romance particularly well, there is an argument to be made that Adam created him too—or at least created their love story. Across the internet, it is widely agreed that Harry is alive when he first appears in Adam’s doorway, drunk, and is turned away. When Adam finds Harry dead the first time he visits Harry’s apartment, the bottle of whiskey Harry was holding that night is by his dead body, pointing to him having died that night. Perhaps, having regretted sending Harry away and deep in his loneliness, Adam writes himself a love story so compelling that he goes to find Harry by the end of the movie but discovers it’s too late.

            Adam’s writer-brain is at least somewhat at play throughout the movie as a close watch reveals that the majority of the most tender scenes of Harry and Adam living in domestic bliss are actually drug-induced hallucinations sandwiched between their wild night out at the club. Even within this altered world, not everything that’s shown is a part of the canonical timeline.

            The next theory is that Adam is experiencing the events of the movie as dreams or hallucinations from where he’s dying in the hospital. Throughout the film, the ghosts he’s surrounded by frequently reference Adam having a fever or seeming unwell. He frequently wakes up in a cold sweat. There are moments where it seems that the ghosts trigger his fevers, but he also hardly interacts with people who aren’t ghosts, so it’s difficult to decipher if the illness is induced by his interactions with the dead; though he does seem to deteriorate faster the more time he spends with his parents in their alternate world. These repeated fever references, that feel significant for how often they’re mentioned, don’t ultimately build towards any kind of definitive reveal.

            These mentions of being unwell are likely a carry-over from the source material. In the novel, the main character is often told he looks gaunt or sickly but can’t recognize it in himself. This isn’t the theory that I find most compelling, though, because the illness as it’s portrayed in the movie seems like a dangling end that Haigh lifted for an unrealized purpose.

            The final theory is that Adam is already dead. The empty apartment block represents a sort of purgatory. In scenes there, it is nearly always evening, and it’s eerily empty without a doorman or any other residents, which seems strange for densely populated London. The apartment building represents a liminal space, perhaps where his soul is waiting for resolution. To facilitate this, he’s allowed to visit his parents and gain a sense of closure for himself but also provide them with answers about their own deaths that have troubled them. Ghosts in All of Us Strangers are not omniscient.

            He also falls in love with Harry, the other trapped soul waiting in apartment purgatory. Adam and Harry help one another work through lingering sadness around their own families and the course of their romantic lives. They have an instant, magnetic connection despite the generation gap that’s playfully exposed through the film’s well-crafted dialogue. Once they have offered one another what they needed, it is revealed to Adam what Harry has, at some point, learned about himself. Harry is dead, and in this theory, so is Adam. This would explain the general lack of shock Adam portrays after the initial confusion at the state of Harry’s apartment. Adam simply leads Harry’s ghost back up to his apartment to the bed where they shared so many happy moments; they hold each other as the bed dissolves into a supernova, implying that the two have finally passed on to heaven, or wherever next place is.

            This is somewhat contradicted by their wild trip to the club; though, with Adam’s father in the early part of the film, it is established that these ghosts can interact with the outside world on rare occasions. If they are both ghosts, this night out makes more sense. The only other sticking point I find with this interpretation is that Adam feels held apart from the ghosts he builds his life with. From the fever references to the more grounded sense Scott offers his character in his portrayal, Adam stands apart. This can, however, be explained by Adam not being aware of his ghostly status until the end of the movie.

            The charm of All of Us Strangers, and why it’s been nominated for BAFTAs, a Critics Choice Award, and a Golden Globe, among others, is that the love story transcends the strange inconsistencies of the world. Regardless of when Harry died or if Adam was ever alive, the two have an electric connection built through quiet, tender moments that mostly take place in Adam’s apartment, building physical and emotional intimacy within the limited scope.

I spend a lot of time writing about “no plot just vibes” literary books, and while All of Us Strangers offers a larger than life (and death) premise, it most cleanly fits this category. The movie deals with matters of grief, unrealized possibility, and reckoning with the unsaid as its primary concerns. Worldbuilding, in this case, is only the confusing set dressing that facilitates the unique conversations that everyone who’s lost someone close to them wishes they could have. Similarly, the romance is strong enough to yank on viewers’ heartstrings even if Adam and Harry don’t get to live out a happily ever after. In the end, they choose one another, and larger cosmic complications notwithstanding, that is enough.

            All of Us Strangers is a success on the basis of the dialogue, the intimate moments, and the stunning performances given by Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy, and Jamie Bell. The film manages to find essential human truths that are undeniable through the inconsistencies of the alien world and offer an ultimate emotional payoff that circumvents storytelling technicalities.

Religious horror hits differently for folks who were raised religious, particularly Christian. I personally find religious horror to be particularly difficult to watch at times because of how they paint the church. As well as those who consider themselves to be some form of Christian. Franchises like The Conjuring are very guilty of Christian propaganda (it gets even more egregious as the films go on) and fail to critique much of anything. Often feeding into narratives that if you’re not a person of faith, then your fate is doom. The First Omen (2024) is the polar opposite of that, and in fact is the pro-choice film we need at this point in time. It’s a prequel to The Omen (1976) that sheds some insight into the horrors of how Damien came to be.

The First Omen follows a young woman named Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) who goes to Rome in 1971 to work in a church, only to uncover sinister conspiracies surrounding the birth of the Antichrist. Margaret isn’t your typical leading lady in a religious horror film. She has a personality, doubts about her own faith, and is a tremendous main character. Nell Tiger Free’s performance helps convey that perfectly as she slowly comes to understand the dangers she and Carlita (Nicole Sorace) are in. As well as the real story about her own conception and the churches’ abuse of other women.

Throughout the film the imagery becomes increasingly disturbing and there is sexual violence (mentioned and briefly shown), none of which are depicted as an attempt at titillating anyone. The First Omen captures the horrific reality of violation and lack of choice. Despite how the film is set in 1971, its messages surrounding pro-choice, sexual violence, and bodily autonomy as a whole are very relevant. Especially with Margaret not only being a product of sexual violence by way of a jackal, but also a survivor of it (also by way of the same jackal). Instead of the church being a place of safety for her, they were orchestrating all of these events to force her to give birth to the Antichrist.

The film does have periods of lull, but for a directorial debut. Arkasha Stevenson understands the task. At the very heart of The First Omen isn’t strictly the story about the Antichrist. A lesser film wouldn’t allow her to have relationships or connections that last until the end of the film (such as hers with her daughter that was born alongside Damien or Carlita) or would capitalize off that and make Margaret nothing more than a cheap spectacle. A prequel that manages to add more to the lore of a classic is hard to come by. But we’ve been given a gem this time around.

If you’re looking for a film with cheap jump scares and a lot of moments involving the jackal, you won’t find them. It’s a slow burn prequel with homages (to the original and similar films) that’s meant to disturb you by way of visuals and sheer atmosphere. There are some scenes that even I, as someone who isn’t easily shaken, was shocked by. Spoiling those does a disservice to you as the viewer, but if you’re squeamish, then you might get freaked.

At the end of the day, The First Omen is worth checking out, even if you’ve yet to see The Omen (1971). Since it’s a prequel, you can watch it and then check out The Omen because it’s certainly worth watching as well. There is a major tonal shift (symptom of the time the first film came out and also artistic vision) between both movies, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But don’t go in expecting the same feeling, other than the dread that’s built into both. And whatever you do, don’t compare the films because The First Omen’s messaging isn’t to be disregarded. Walk into it with an open mind and allow yourself to be immersed in the experience. You might not be disappointed if my praises have swayed you. And there’s much more I could discuss, but then I’d be talking your ear off.

Currently, you can watch the entire The Omen franchise on Disney+ or Hulu. Meanwhile, you’ll have to go to the theater to watch The First Omen. If it’s safe enough for you to do so, watching this at least once in the theater is highly recommended.

“There are all kinds of spirits. Some are born from the towering majesty of the mountains or the distant stars and are revered as nature gods. Some spirits bring about disaster through their very existence and are called gods of calamity. But in the end, they’re all spirits, and surely even the smaller spirits are just smaller gods.”

For me, a lot of the appeal of any crime/mystery story hinges on the appeal of the fictional investigator who sets out to solve the case (think Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Henry Bosch, or Benoit Blanc, for example), and Yoo gives us a terrific protagonist in police detective Kim Han-gil. Han-gil works at the Jong-ro Police Department’s violent crimes unit in Seoul, and, in addition to being a detective, he is also able to see and interact with the world of spirits that most people don’t even know exists. While Han-gil is a highly competent and insightful detective, his spiritual abilities (and to some extent his somewhat stand-offish personality) make him an outsider at work, where the other detectives are taking bets on how long his latest partner will last before asking for reassignment. For reasons made clear as his backstory unfolds, Han-gil is also something of an outsider in the spiritualist community. They are the ones who call him “the spirit detective,” a phrase “only ever said with an air of dismissal and derision.”

Han-gil is tasked with investigating what seems to be a series of odd suicides, but soon realizes that there is something profoundly sinister at work, possibly involving a soul-devouring spirit he knows only too well from his own past. As the investigation unveils further mysteries and threats, Han-gil must race against time to protect other innocent people from being hurt and killed.

Like I already mentioned, the investigator is a key ingredient in these kinds of stories, and Han-gil, with his rather blunt manner and emotional complexity, makes for a fascinating protagonist. His life has been shaped by the traumatic loss of his mother when he was still a child, and during this investigation, he is unexpectedly thrown together with Shin Yoonhae who was intimately involved in the events surrounding the death of Han-gil’s mother. This meeting, and the tentative and conflicted relationship that follows, is both fraught and tender at the same time, as they both deal with a tangle of lingering guilt, anger, and grief.

Every part of Small Gods of Calamity is skillfully crafted. The mystery-solving, puzzle aspect of the investigation had me hooked, with mysterious clues to follow and with various people, ghosts, and spirits helping and hindering Han-gil as he tries to prevent another tragedy.

One of the things I particularly love is how we get to see the world like Han-gil sees it: a place where the presence of spirits and ghosts, the use of wards, amulets, and talismans, is as natural as any technology or everyday phenomena we take for granted. The descriptions of how Han-gil perceives the spirit world, his “spirit sense,” as something that is “entangled with his other senses—mostly centering on sound, smell, and taste” give the supernatural interactions in the story a tangible, tactile quality that is very effective.

All fiction has to do some form of worldbuilding, of course, but it’s often more noticeable in speculative fiction where a writer has to establish the features and parameters of their invented universe. In Small Gods of Calamity Yoo handles this challenge deftly, letting you know enough about the spirit world’s intricate rules and harrowing perils to keep you tethered to the plot at every turn without ever weighing down the story.

The emotional depth and complexity of Han-gil as a character, and his delicately nuanced relationship with Shin Yoonhae make this story hit a lot harder, and cut a lot deeper, than it otherwise would. There’s a softness and warmth in their interactions that add to the novella’s appeal for me. This is not a cozy mystery by any stretch of the imagination, but there’s a thoughtfulness in the writing that leaves space for the characters to grow, and to consider their own emotions and motives rather than just acting out in the worst way possible. Yoo unfolds this relationship with insight and care, showing us how these two characters are drawn together even though the past might be seen as an insurmountable obstacle. Forgiveness and redemption are allowed to take root even in the midst of danger and horror.

Small Gods of Calamity is a suspenseful, supernatural murder mystery that kept me on tenterhooks throughout, and I’m kind of hoping this is not the last time I’ll get to jump into the spirit world with Kim Han-gil.

Sam Kyung Yoo’s short fiction is also well worth checking out, for example, “Nextype” in Strange Horizons, and “Even Robots Can Cry” in Fireside.

About the Author

Sam Kyung Yoo is a queer/ace author and third-degree black belt taekwondo instructor from Massachusetts. They graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in English, creative writing, and film studies, but have since abandoned academia to write stories about ghosts, East Asian folklore, and sad robots. Their work has been published by Fantasy, Neon Hemlock Press, Strange Horizons, among others. You can find them online at samkyungyoo.com.

Small Gods of Calamity is available now from Interstellar Flight Press: https://www.interstellarflightpress.com/smallgodsofcalamity.html

But like most stories about death, Gravediggers’ Guild is equally about life, and what it means to live in the current moment, with all of history behind us and around us (and ahead of us, thanks to a central conceit of the story).

The novel is a love letter to the Deux-Sèvres region of France and its rural, agricultural history. The author, Mathias Énard, spent his childhood in the region, and his deep affection for it comes through the narrative, first filtered through the eyes of David, an enthusiastic but clueless Parisian graduate student who comes there to write a dissertation on what it means to live in the country nowadays. After introducing us to the village of La Pierre-Saint-Christophe and its inhabitants through David, the narrative moves back to show the bigger picture of what’s going on, all the truths that David is oblivious to.

To be fair, the villagers are oblivious as well to the great Wheel of Suffering turning around them. Everything that lives in the Deux-Sèvres is caught up in an endless cycle of reincarnation, from trees and insects to pigs and humans. Individual souls move back and forth between all of these categories, with particularly gruesome murderers spending multiple lifetimes as annelid worms living in a mildewed bathroom and beloved grandmothers returning as equally beloved family dogs.

The only people aware of the presence of Death around them are the gravediggers, funeral directors, and others who are directly involved with it in a hands-on way. Once a year, Death gives these men (and they are all men, which sparks debate among them) three days off for their banquet, where they celebrate life by gorging themselves on food and challenging each other to reach absurd heights of oratory.

The banquet sits at the center of the text, with David’s observations forming the beginning and end. In the remaining sections of the first and last halves, a third-person omniscient narrator carries us around the region, dipping in and out of history to tell us about the lives of the villagers we’ve met. Particularly effective are the short “Song” chapters that break up longer sections, where we are given  brief glimpses of individual lives and deaths in the region’s history.

The soul of the local priest, who died just before David came to town, lives on in the body of a wild boar, enjoying frolicking in the snow and mating with every sow he can find. The local bartender was (or will eventually be; the rules of incarnation here move souls forward and backward in time indiscriminately) a bedbug who bit Napoleon shortly before he was sent into exile. The dog that loyally follows David’s love interest around her farmhouse is, in fact, her own grandmother in a new body.

It’s emphasized that most souls are neither very good nor very bad people, and so they remain in the Deux-Sèvres life after life as farmers and villagers, occasionally getting caught up in the wars of religion that raged through the region over the centuries. The cycle of life and death binds them to the land over and over again, either tending to it, growing in it, or walking its surface with four feet.

The overall effect is to show how history and today are deeply interwoven and can’t be separated. The presence of David, the naive anthropologist who doesn’t even think to begin shifting his city-based viewpoint until he’s been in the region for months and begun to fall in love, allows the story to demonstrate how even if we’re not aware of life and death, they’re going on all around us all the time. The world carries on, whether or not we notice. David’s shifts of allegiance over the course of the novel, from Paris to the Deux-Sèvres and from academia to agriculture, show the subconscious desire to be part of this cycle and grounded in the world.

All of this is ambitious work for one novel, and it doesn’t succeed across the board. The framing device of David’s perspective demonstrates that key obliviousness, but inherent with that is a sense of disconnection. These opening and closing sections don’t quite click with the rest of the novel; we go from an airplane’s-level view to being down with the bees in the grass, and it’s disorienting.

Énard also draws on the vast French canon of literature, philosophy, and the vast overlap between them; the oratory at the Banquet involves several retellings of Rabelais, among other duels of quotations. This also creates some disconnection from the text for those not deeply steeped in the canon. To be fair, this may be an intentional device, to create the feeling that there’s something big happening just out of sight, just beyond what we can grasp with our understanding of the world.

Gravediggers’ Guild is well worth the reading. The descriptions of the natural beauty of the region alone (fields and forests, punting on a river, the priest-boar’s revels in the woods) are well worth tackling the Rabelais. The digressions on language (the regional dialect, Poitevin-Saintongeais, stymies David and features heavily in one of the murders that the narrative carries us back in time to) are fascinating, and the operatic scope of the Banquet revelries (the guildmaster takes two pages to list everything he ate and drank; there is a sense that the feasting and speeches are the purest distillation of what it is to be human and alive) all linger after the last page.

Énard offers a sweeping view of life, death, and how each person is simultaneously a very small piece in a great game and the owner of the only perspective they can possibly have on it all.

Gogmagog is set in a country called Kethra, which is a sort of rundown, disheveled, alt-universe version of post-war Britain, scarred by war and strife, inhabited by various tribes that may or may not be almost human: the Azeel, the Alkhym, the Wodwo tribe, and more. Through this country runs the river Nysis:

“They called it the Winding Way, and by Lud they were right to do so, with so many twists and turns along its length from source to sea, freshwater to salt.” 

The story begins on the shores of the Nysis, in Anglestume, and it begins with Cady Meade, the seventy-eight-year-old former river-boat captain who is now mostly land-bound and retired, scrounging for scraps and rum, surviving as best she can on her pension from The Amalgamated Union of Bargemen, Waterwomen, River Pilots and Apprentices. Cady is old and crotchety, missing the old days when she traveled the river on the regular, bringing people safely through the dangers of the spectral waters. Her river-traveling days are over, so she thinks, but now two strangers are looking to hire her for a job that requires someone who knows the Nysis, someone skilled at spectral navigation, someone who can take a sick girl upriver, all the way to the city of Ludwich, post haste.

Cady doesn’t exactly jump at the chance. She gripes and groans all the way, but eventually she goes. Not just because of the job and the passengers, but because she is haunted by visions of her own, visions of a mysterious threat hiding in the waters of the Nysis, a quest that calls her back to the river, back to her river boat, the Juniper, and back to her own mysterious past.

The journey to Ludwich is perilous because the waters are changeable and unpredictable in ways that have nothing to do with currents and tides:

“…hanging like a shroud over the Nysis, the first dark shimmer of the ghost waters awaited them. From this point on, the river would be taken over by Faynr, the spirit of a long-dead dragon. Taken over, possessed, transformed.”

The crew aboard the Juniper is a decidedly motley one. There’s Cady, of course, and Yanish, a young Azeel man whose shadow has a mind of its own. Cady took him under her wing years ago, and he was once her deckhand but, on this trip, much to Cady’s chagrin, he is the captain. Finally, there are the two paying passengers: Brin, a young Alkhym girl who desperately needs to get to Ludwich for reasons she won’t reveal, and her protector, Lek, a Thrawl, an artificial, robot-like being with a brain of crystal who seems to know things about Cady that the old navigator would rather keep to herself. None of them, least of all Cady, is exactly who and what they seem to be, and each of them brings their own secrets, and their own darkness and shadows, as baggage.

A lot of great fantasy stories are built around quests that turn into journeys. Obvious, classic examples include The Lord of the Rings, Ged’s journeys through Earthsea, and C.S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Certainly, there is a quest in Gogmagog: to bring Brin to Ludwich before she succumbs to the mystery illness that afflicts her, and there’s also Cady’s own quest, the one she’s received in a vision from “the outer fields,” that concerns the river and the lands around it (and maybe the dead dragon too). But to me, the Juniper’s journey feels more akin to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (or its movie sibling Apocalypse Now) than anything else, what with its group of travelers heading into mysterious waters, navigating strange currents where wonders and dangers lurk, and where they risk being changed irrevocably by what they might find, and what they might lose, along the way.

Navigating through the ghost of Faynr is a dangerous undertaking. Different parts of the ghost have affected the river in different ways, and all sorts of outlandish threats lurk in the waters, in the air, and on the riverbanks, but even in her old age, no one knows better than Cady how to navigate the waters and bring vessel and passengers safely through. However, even she is pushed to the brink of her abilities because the Nysis seems to be changing in peculiar and unexpected ways.

There’s a trippy, phantasmagoric vibe to the entire river trip, indeed this entire book. Every page is filled with strange magic and weird technology, surreal visions, and unusual encounters, and the farther into the ghost waters the Juniper travels, the more we find out about the memories rattling around in the recesses of Cady’s brain, as well as in the crystal skull of Lek, and all sorts of secrets and mysteries begin to unravel. All this while Cady’s, and the crew’s, dreams and nightmares gather like mist and fog over the water, and visions of dragons rise out of the past.

Gogmagog is a book that sprawls and twists, and even in its darkest moments, there’s a playful, joyful feel to the story, personified by Cady, who is a wonderfully cantankerous presence, salty and bawdy, sly and brazen, thorny and (occasionally) soft. Around her, Beard and Noon build Kethra with capacious glee, creating a wholly original world that feels organic and alive, like a wild and vivid garden.

Some of the secrets and mysteries of the crew, and Kethra, are explained before the end of the journey, but other secrets and mysteries only deepen the further we travel with the Juniper, because something ominous is happening to the Nysis and to Faynr’s ghost. I’m not being spoilery if I say that Gogmagog ends on a cliffhanger of sorts, because, as is implied by the book’s title, Gogmagog: The First Chronicle of Ludwich, there is more to come. Indeed, Gogmagog is the first in a duology and book two, Ludluda, is already set for release in late 2024 and I am eagerly looking forward to returning to Kethra later this year.

Gogmagog: The First Chronicle of Ludwich is available now from Angry Robot Books.

The Messenger

“I am dead,” reads Signs‘s very first sentence, marking the beginning of the journey to the underworld. A hole in the asphalt breaks open and swallows people into the underground. This mystical opening is commonplace in Makina’s nameless mining town in Mexico, “riddled with bullet holes from centuries of voracious silver lust.” The violent underworld the novella unveils is both mythological and dirt-real, a place of wandering migrant souls and phantasmal gangsters and deities.

Navigating this perilous terrain is Makina, a translator and messenger between the people of both border sites, fluent in all three languages spoken by those she connects through their harsh realities. Makina identifies strongly with this role: “You are the door, not the one who walks through it,” she tells herself. But when her mother sends her to bring back her impressionable brother from across the US border, where he has been lured by the false hope of property, she journeys from her hometown to the Rio Grande, finding herself in a dark world full of coyotes, vigilantes, and border patrols.

The Parallels of Aztecan and Greek Underworlds

We find both the Aztecan underworld of Mictlán and the Greek/Roman underworld of Hades/Orcus interwoven in Signs. Herrera first throws the western readers into the familiar waters of Greek mythology in chapter two, “The Water Crossing.” Here, they get the obvious hint with the appearance of a psychopomp of dead souls: the ferryman Charon. We meet him in the character of Chucho, who smuggles Makina across the Río Bravo/River Acheron via a tractor tube.

According to Greek legend, the souls that cannot pay the ferryman for crossing are forced to throw themselves into the Acheron in desperation. When Chucho and Makina cross the river, at one point their tube is turned and “the world turned cold and green and filled with invisible water monsters dragging her away.” It appears the jealous souls of the debtors are trying to pull Makina with them; Chucho pulls her out and delivers her safely to the other side. And here begin Signs‘s merging of Mictlán and Hades.

Mictlán consisted of nine distinct levels giving the book’s chapters their names. The first is Itzcuintlán, where the dead have to cross the Apanohuacalhuia River—border between the living and the dead just like the Acheron—under the watch of the psychopomp god Xolotl. Some see Chucho as Xolotl, however, to cross the Apanohuacalhuia with that god, the dead would require the help of a Xoloitzcuintle, one of his dogs, who decided if the deceased was worthy or not; otherwise, they were eternally stranded. Chucho appears to be a Xoloitzcuintle, much more befitting of a modern coyote: someone who smuggles people over the border.

Katabasis

The ability to enter the realm of the dead whilst still alive and to return is often interpreted as proof of the classical hero’s exceptionalism. An individual who returns from the underworld overcomes eschatological themes such as the cyclical nature of time and existence, achieving defeat of death and the possibility of immortality. The most famous Katabasis narrative, and the one Makina is often adhered to, is the one of Orpheus, who enters the underworld in order to return his deceased wife Eurydice to the world of the living. In Makina’s case Eurydice being her brother, who passed into the underworld of North America. But if the US is Hades/Mictlán and the Mexicans represent the souls crossing over—why is it that they do it so willingly?

Hades Plouton, Bearer of Riches – The Capitalist Side of Death

Most of the knowledge about Mictlán is tragically lost in consequence of the Spanish Conquista and near elimination of Aztecan culture; the story takes place in Mexico for just one chapter, which appears as the world of the living, while the United States is given the role of the underworld. The US, more than any other country in the modern world, has modeled and mythologized itself as the successor of the Roman Empire. Thus, Herrera’s approach of the Underworld as a desired destination is perhaps best explained from the Roman perspective, who themselves invented a new perspective on the lord of the dead. Around the 5th century BC, the Greeks started referring to Hades as Ploútōn, with the root meaning “wealthy.” They figured that from the abode below come riches like fertile crops and metals. Consequently the Roman incarnation Pluto both ruled the underworld and distributed riches.

The US pull on many immigrants is founded in this understanding: land of riches, land of dreams and relief, but also the evil flagship of capitalism, soul-dead and empty. Though this image decreased dramatically in recent years, people everywhere in the world still cling to the concept of North America being the best, the most modern, the promised land—despite overwhelming evidence it is not so, the old legend persisting as only legends can. The first description of this underworld-understanding by a crossed-over soul in Signs is from Makina’s brother, who writes home: “It’s really lonely here, but there’s lots of stuff.” Makina describes the “dead” souls of the US:

“Signs prohibiting things thronged the streets, leading citizens to see themselves as ever protected, safe, friendly innocent, proud, and intermittently bewildered (…) salt of the only earth worth knowing. They flourished in supermarkets, cornucopias where you could have more than everyone else. (…) How miserable they looked in front of those little digital screens.”

It is an apt description of the golden cage of capitalism. She is highly critical of this world and from the beginning she refers to her kinsmen’s journey in terms of the passage of the dead which she then applies to herself. She feels herself “casting off guilt like one may shed belongings,” she is struck by a bullet like a ghost, it doesn’t harm her.

When she finally finds her brother, they do not recognize “the specter of the other.” The promised land belied its promise to him; the property was a lie. Why not leave, Makina asks him, and he has no answer but that he is resolved to his ghostly existence now, a mindless ghost of the Greek Asphodel fields. So why does Makina, not tempted by wealth, not return to the living?

Shedding and Rebirth

In Hades, the blessed souls of Elysium can choose to be reborn, a little-known aspect of Greek mythology, that, however, defines the goal in the underworld of Mictlán. In the nine circles of the Mexican underworld, the soul sheds itself of its identity with each layer and in the final one gets to be reborn. The concept of shedding is referenced throughout the novella, until by the end Makina realizes: “I’ve been skinned.”

According to Socrates and Plato, Elysium dwellers could drink from the river Lethe; to forget selectively or to forget all. But they had to drink from it in order to be reincarnated. Forgetting, leaving behind, is a core theme in Signs; and both the Greeks and the Aztecs seemed to have been unable to separate the idea of rebirth from forgetting and betraying; it is no coincident that Dante’s last circle of hell is treachery.

Versing, as the process is called in Signs, is always a treacherous act in the end, to the ones you belonged to in your first world. For what could be more hurtful to people than forgetting them and yourself? Makina is a living soul presented with this opportunity and she makes a choice that breaks with Katabasis convention.

The Choice of The Buried Seed

The point of Katabasis usually is that the hero returns to the upper world, a triumph of the living over death; Herrera presents a new angle. Certainly, there is much to be desired about Hades: you have immortality, an endless variety of people you could have never met in life, and maybe even a shot at the party of parties: Elysium. What happens when the underworld presents a more attractive living than the cruel reality of life?

At the Greek-imagined border between life and death stands an elm where false dreams cling under every leaf, the perfect parable for the cruel Mexican-American borderlands. The elm tree is hope bred in despair, the desperate kind that is needed to survive the horrors of civil war and poverty so many Latin Americans flee. Makina has been mostly untarnished by these horrors but a deep-seeing witness…and ultimately verses.

As the Romans discovered in the legend of the marriage of Hades and Persephone, Makina discovers death and life can be married to each other and present their union in the buried seed that can come to life anew. Potentially even as something better. With all her initial despise for American Hades, Makina soon finds admirable wonders in it:

She witnesses a same-sex marriage, a black man living in a pretty house; triumphs of the “other” not often found in her home. Elysium tellingly derives from the Greek verb eleusô, meaning “to relieve” or “release.” Death as the merciful ending of suffering is no new concept, but the curious mercy of forgetting oneself in the anonymity of plenty is a fresh and honest perspective. Drinking from Lethe—trying to extinguish one’s often shamed origin—is sadly a frequent road immigrants take.

Not looking back is also the most curious aspect of the Orpheus myth. Hades allows the bard a chance to bring Eurydice back, but under the condition that he must not look back at her; this has been the object of discussion for centuries. The same narrative appears in the Bible: in the book of Genesis Lot’s wife, against the angel’s decree, turns and looks back at the city of Sodom—famously depicted as the ultimate place of sin and unholy freedom—whilst trying to leave it. As Orpheus loses Eurydice to Hades by turning back, Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt. In Judaism, one common view of her ending is as punishment for failing a test. By looking back at the “evil cities” she betrayed her secret longing for that way of life. She was deemed unworthy to be “saved.” But could it be that she simply recognized the freedom of the underworld?

The Sublimity of Rebirth in Translation

What Makina feels most drawn to from the beginning in this other world is the “homegrowns” who are not Mexican nor American, but something more, something new. She observes them warmly:

“They are homegrown and they are anglo and both things with rabid intensity; with restrained fervor they can be the meekest and at the same time the most querulous of citizens, albeit grumbling under their breath. Their gestures and tastes reveal both ancient memory and the wonderment of a new people. (…) More than a midpoint of homegrown and anglo their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born.“

The nebulous process of translation, giving something or someone a new meaning while also holding on to its last, chamfers Herrera’s novella: the meeting of the ancient and the new, realized in the collision of death and life. Reaching the ultimate step in life one can imagine possible—rebirth—Signs Preceding the End of the World manages to become a story never before told, neither in the Greek nor in the Aztecan myths it takes its inspiration from. A story of a heroine reaching Elysium and being rewarded for rendering herself into something new, that transcends both the old and the present, the established borders of upper and lower world, the United States and Mexico, and ultimately presents the heroic overcoming of the manifest destiny bestowed upon a soul by the circumstances of her birth. Makina is not gone at the end of the story; but something more.

Like her two most recent novels, All the Murmuring Bones and The Path of Thorns, The Briar Book of the Dead is set in Slatter’s Sourdough universe, familiar territory for readers of her fiction. If you’re not already acquainted with this dark fantasy realm of witches and shapeshifters, magic and wicked deeds, you can sample it in many of Slatter’s short stories, for example “Bearskin” and “St. Dymphna’s School For Poison Girls,” as well as in short story collections like Sourdough and Other Stories and The Bitterwood Bible.

In The Briar Book of the Dead, we find ourselves in the small, rather isolated town of Silverton, perched on the border of the menacing Darklands. For generations, Silverton has been ruled by the women of the Briar family, headed by whomever among them is chosen to be the Briar Witch. The Briar family’s power in Silverton is built on magic and competence: they take care of the villagers and protect them from dangers both magical and otherwise, and in turn they receive the loyalty and service of the citizens. There is an interesting balance here that Slatter alludes to early on and which plays an ever more important role as we get deeper into the story, concerning the relationship between the witches and the citizens of Silverton. It’s about a bargain struck for mutual benefit, and about the price that must be paid, in the present as it was in the past, in order to seal that bond.

The narrator of the story is Ellie Briar, a young woman who, much to her own and her family’s chagrin, is the first non-witch born into the Briar family for generations. Ellie, a most competent and self-possessed young woman, has seemingly learned to accept her non-magical fate, and is being trained to take on the role of steward (basically the town administrator) while more important town business goes to the magically gifted members of the family. Slatter—always a master at writing flawed and complex women—captures Ellie with great care and skill right from the opening scene when she fails yet another ritual meant to awaken her magic. While Ellie isn’t exactly an outcast in her witchy family, she does feel like the odd one out, and there is a lingering sense of sadness and failure, a sense of ability and purpose thwarted, that bleeds through in her interactions with the other Briar women.

Then, Ellie’s grandmother, the Briar Witch and family matriarch, dies suddenly. In the aftermath of that loss, Ellie gains a completely unexpected new ability: she can see and speak to the dead. And, as it turns out, there are ghosts aplenty in Silverton, each one with a story, each one with a reason to cling to the world of the living. Listening to the tales of the ghosts, Ellie begins to unravel some of the deep, dark secrets buried in the Briar family’s past, while she also realizes that there is a knotty tangle of terrible secrets and schemes at play in the present. From here, the novel reads like a thrilling and thoroughly compelling mix of murder mystery, dark fantasy, and haunted family chronicle rife with mysterious deaths, ominous disappearances, and rumors of a powerful grimoire that may or may not be lost.

Many writers of fantasy and science fiction construct vast fictional realms which they return to again and again, adding characters, backstories, and new plotlines over time. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Le Guin’s Earthsea are two well-known examples. In contemporary speculative fiction, I’ve been drawn into the sprawling fantastical worlds of P. Djèlí Clark’s Dead Djinn universe, E. Catherine Tobler’s Traveling Circus universe, Yoon Ha Lee’s Hexarchate stories, and Aliette de Bodard’s Universe of Xuya, among others.

I would put Slatter’s Sourdough universe right up there with the best of these fictional realms. In her short fiction, novellas, and novels, Slatter has created, and keeps creating, a vividly drawn, intricately detailed world. It’s a world run through with magic and stories, spells and tales, misdeeds and glory, and Slatter moves through it all with peerless imaginative purpose, weaving together the smallest yarns and anecdotes with the grandest tales. Characters and storylines echo through the work: old stories return as myths or half-forgotten rumor, children who grew up in the shadow of one tale return to wreak havoc in another, and sins that went unpunished in one lifetime, seep into the fabric of other lives.

For example, some of the story threads in The Briar Book of the Dead run back to Slatter’s 2015 novella, Of Sorrow and Such. You certainly don’t need to read that novella before you read The Briar Book of the Dead, but it is fascinating to see the way those threads run through the weft and warp of this book, tugging at the lives of Ellie Briar and the people of Silverton.

I’ve often said that no one writes witches like A.G. Slatter, but more than that, few writers write women like Slatter does and, as in all her work, The Briar Book of the Dead is full of flawed and fascinating women, women who are never reduced to just being innocents victims or vicious perpetrators, and who go about wielding whatever power they can grab in order to gain something for themselves in a world that is rarely made for their benefit. Ellie Briar is one of these women, and certainly one of the most captivating of Slatter’s heroines to date. Keen of eye and mind, Ellie is often underestimated by the people around her, and she is driven, not so much by goodness or heroism, perhaps, as by a sense of loyalty: to her family, certainly, but maybe even more to her community and the inhabitants of Silverton, both the living and the dead.

As the book’s title suggests, the dead, and, by extension, the past, haunt every step of this tale, as choices made long ago—lies, deceptions, love—are disinterred and brought to light. The more Ellie learns, the more she realizes that all of Silverton might be in danger, because magic, like all Briar women well know, comes at a price. The question is who will be made to pay.

Slatter is at the top of her game in The Briar Book of the Dead, weaving her magic into every page, luring you in with her exquisite prose and finely crafted characters and then pulling you in ever further as the plot thickens, the dead bodies pile up, and the ghosts gather in Silverton.

The Briar Book of the Dead is available now from Titan Books.

Recruited by his friend Lark for an illegal and dangerous but potentially profitable job that requires someone of his particular talents, Snow is thrown together with Gem who was once his best friend (and more) when they were just two young jakes in the local junza. For eight long years, however, Snow has believed Gem to be dead and now, the unexpected reunion and the perilous road trip they undertake together, rips up old wounds as they burrow deeper into the secrets beneath, and within, New Arcadia.

There’s a particular kind of readerly joy I feel when I crack open a fantasy story (whether it’s a novel, novella, short story, flash, or whatever) and find myself immediately enveloped by a finely woven fictional world where, even though I can only glimpse it through the first few sentences and paragraphs, I already feel the world stretch and flex and flutter enticingly beyond the text. These are the stories where a fictional universe’s language, slang, history, politics, religion, social mores, magic, biases and bigotry, are not info-dumped like a load of rocks off a truck, but rather skillfully stitched into the fabric of dialogue and plot, characters and descriptions, giving the story, and the world, texture, depth, and luster.

Finding Echoes is precisely this kind of story, and its opening paragraph is perfectly crafted to introduce us to Snow and his trade, and to pull us into the gritty streets of Charybdis Precinct:

“The dead boy’s umbra is three days faint, shot through with red and black. It crouches in the cramped and cluttered corner of this cramped and cluttered rookery, waiting for time or a vox like me to bring it some semblance of peace. Unlike the boy himself, the umbra bears no signs of violence, no cuts or blood or bruising. Its face is clear, its clothes as neat as they ever were in life. The Kithans would have me believe that what I see here is the soul of the boy whose body lies shrouded and cold three rooms away, poor minnow, but I don’t believe that. People lie, but umbras can’t: they’re shadows of the dead, not the dead themselves. The umbra whimpers: a high, thin note that I alone can hear.”

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I love how deftly Snow’s trade as a vox is introduced here, together with his forlorn empathy, some specifics about the umbras (they can’t lie, for example), and the feel of the world Snow inhabits: a place cluttered and cramped, bruised by violence and poverty.

As you might be able to tell from the quoted paragraph, this is not a fantasy tale concerned with royalty, palaces, and courtiers. Rather, it’s the kind of fantasy tale I prefer: a tale about the disadvantaged finding ways to live their lives in spite of injustice and deprivation, and in spite of the privileged, the rich goldplates of New Arcadia in this case, doing their damndest to keep others in the dark in more ways than one.

Spun around the perilous quest Gem and Snow undertake, and the exploration of the society they live in—its dark corners and harsh edges—is the story of their relationship, seemingly torn apart years ago, though we soon realize that their bond, though tattered, still tugs at both of them. Turns out that love, even if you lose it in a seemingly hopeless place, is not easily crushed.

Ursula K. Le Guin once poked fun at the kind of fantasy worlds that have “no economics and no social justice,” calling them “lazy-minded, recycled hokum,” and instead professed her love of fantasy “set in a genuinely imagined society and culture.” In Finding Echoes, Meadows most certainly delivers the latter, a genuinely imagined world where you can clearly sense how the social structure and hierarchy shapes the fate of everyone; a world where it takes skill and keenness, something Snow certainly possesses, to survive with your body and your soul reasonably intact.

There’s a great interview with Meadows in Nino Cipri’s recent newsletter where they talk about Finding Echoes and about New Arcadia, and how it is a world they started building in their head years ago, “its details accreting through multiple failed attempts at telling the wrong sort of story until, at long last, I stumbled on the right one.” As a reader, I really appreciate that accretion of detail and the weight it gives the story as we move through the world in the company of Snow and Gem.

On top of everything else I’ve already mentioned, Finding Echoes is quite simply a lot of fun to read. There’s suspense, heartbreak, queer love of more than one flavor, treacherous politics, swaggering thieves, as well as several ghosts, and while the story has plenty of grit and darkness in its depictions of addiction, greed, and cruelty, Meadows lets the light in too, leaving space for resilience, resistance, and even a bit of tenderness between two jakes.

Finding Echoes is available now from Neon Hemlock Press.

An impressive feat of stop motion animation is the dark fairytale film Blood Tea and Red String, created by artist Christiane Cegavske. Gaining cult-classic acclaim since its 2006 release, Blood Tea took Cegavske more than a decade to film and create the characters, scenery, storyline, even the puppets and their outfits, by herself. Only the musical score (haunting folk music of flute and accordion) was created by Mark Growden. The film has no dialogue, so all the emoting happens through the stop motion puppets, which offers the story an added layer of mysticism through non-verbal communication. The film’s creator even plays a meta role at the beginning and end of the film, reminiscent of a traditional fairytale’s narrator.

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In Blood Tea, a coven of aristocratic white mice dressed in old-fashioned finery commission the Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak to handcraft a life-sized doll girl for them. The artisan creatures do so in their woodland cottage, but soon they find themselves enamored with their ragged creation. When the white mice come to take the doll home, the Oak Dwellers follow, witnessing a feast of blood-stained teacups and the red string of fate woven through the doll’s hands, binding her to the mice and their debauchery. The Oak Dwellers decide to steal the doll back, thus beginning a long and mystical journey of destruction and renewal, through fields of skull-faced sunflowers, giant spiderwebs, and mythical forests.

The inanimate doll that becomes the object of the characters’ obsession and affection represents the sublime. She is simultaneously a Jesus and a Virgin Mary figure, as she bears stigmata in her palms and is strung up in symbolic crucifixion, while containing inside her fabric belly an immaculate conception: an egg that, once hatched, becomes a bird with a girl’s face; a harpy. The doll’s body turns into a reliquary for life and death, as she becomes the messianic prize in the war sparked between the aristocratic mice and the forest creatures. Greed, tenderness, and possessiveness are themes that are tightly woven through the film like a red string, making for a breathless, beautiful rendition of the traditional folk-tale quest.

Jan Švankmajer is another director who uses a mix of stop motion and live action—including several weird cloth puppets and clay creations—in his short and feature-length films. He is the creator of Alice (1988), a retelling of the classic Lewis Carroll tale made even more whimsical and nightmarish through childhood toys turned into amalgamations of found objects and bare bone. The White Rabbit that sets the events of the film in motion is a taxidermied animal who breaks his own glass display case and escapes into Wonderland’s domestic dreamscape, only for young Alice to follow. Many Švankmajer short films (freely available on YouTube) are shot exclusively using the stop motion technique. Inspiration is drawn from fairytales, classical paintings, and philosophy, while the various shorts feature food, insects, childhood memorabilia, and humanoid figures struggling to connect with, and escape from, each other.

Written and directed by David Lynch, Rabbits is another series of interconnected short films where the abstract and the bizarre is given literal shape through malleable material (though each scene was originally shot live action). Three anthropomorphic rabbits play house as father, mother, and daughter. A family drama unfolds through domestic and mundane tableaus, accompanied by haunting music, a laugh track at inappropriate moments like a funhouse mirror image of a traditional sitcom, and sparse, unsettling, dementia-like dialogue, each character’s lines out of sync with the others’. The rabbit family sits on the sofa of a middle-class living room, staring at the spot where a TV should have been—directly toward the viewer, as the lines between stage and home, observer and object of observation, become blurred.

The traditional sitcom scene is interrupted by ritualistic summoning of entities, burning wall clocks, and spontaneous singing possessions, images that blend horror and haunted house elements into the already psychologically fraught sitcom. Despite those interruptions, the rabbits continue to go through the motions of their comfortable lives with an incrementally creepier undercurrent. Is it a purgatory loop or a normal existential-dread night in with the family? The question remains unanswered, and all the more eerie for it. Rabbits is a Lynchian movie, through and through: alienation, automation, absurdism, and a family of puppets falling apart at the seams.

The novel is centered around Torben Helle, a Danish expat art-historian who is taken to a remote, gelid Northumbrian mansion for a ten-year reunion with university friends. This reunion turns into a mysterious, deadly, and unsettling experience as the friends’ harrowing journey begins to elapse. The usual harbingers of mystery are evident from the secluded mansion to the eccentricities of their host who gives the reader additional intrigue to dissect.

On narrative, Torben, as the protagonist of this novel and his relationships with his university friends and their intricacies make up much of this novel. While witty humor and stark tenseness juxtapose one-another throughout this novel, it should be noted that this is certainly a more character driven narrative at large. Secrets begin to emerge as copious alcohol is consumed and the night progresses. But more importantly, a sense of intimacy between friends allows for this atmosphere of reflection to slowly become one where the air is off and old fixations and unknown truths lead to greater distrust as the night wears on. This is perhaps most poignant in terms of Anthony Dodd’s revelations regarding his will. This plot seeks to solve the suspicious death that makes this narrative whole but is also heavily concerned with the relationships between characters.

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On setting, Jensen’s rich, atmospheric imagery and description allows the reader to fully surrender themselves to the jarring, hoary nature blanketing the world around the mansion and silencing the fear held within. I was intrigued by the mansion being presented as being owned by the most “successful” of the bunch in that such murder mysteries are often tied to the rich and the opulent homes they possess and this feels like an ode to this tradition. A certain sense of the traditional oozes through this novel despite its modern setting and this old-world feel at times, brings forward a sense of nostalgia in relation to the literature of the past.

On character, Jensen’s emphasis on careful diversity that only serves the core narrative should be paid attention to in that it allows the reader to work through the mystery with very few giveaways. This ensures not only that the readability is maintained but also allows for strength of narrative progression that keeps the reader consistently engaged. The variety of character backgrounds from a police inspector to an academic, serves to highlight a sense of contrast that reads as clearly well thought out.

As a conversational Danish speaker and admirer of Danish culture, I especially appreciated the carefully crafted and embedded commentary made by Helle in relation to rather comical commentary widely shared in Denmark. This is most poignant with sardonic reflections on the Swedes. Something important to note, is that this cultural embedding is important and seldom maintained in many novels. Jensen must be commended for this. In addition, the inclusion of a Danish glossary was a fantastic addition beyond pure utility.

As a whole, this is not the usual murder-mystery that has stoked interest for many generations. Instead, Helle and Death presents the reader with a more contemporary depiction of this genre while challenging anglophone hegemony through Danish additions that serve, on a deeper level, to engage with the greater multilingualism and multiculturalism that has begun to make this globalized world feel more like a village with each passing day. It should be said that the intensity of the denouement made up for the more character heavy slower middle of this novel.

While the ending packs a mighty punch, you will have to read this novel by Oskar Jensen to find out more. This all-engrossing novel launches in January 2024 and should definitely be on your reading list!

(Spoiler warning: I will spoil the outcome of Last Ones Left Alive in this review, though the fact that there is a sequel is probably a spoiler in itself.)

Both Last Ones Left Alive and Silent City are narrated by Orpen, a young woman who grew up on an isolated, skrake-free island off the Irish coast. There, she was raised by her mother and Maeve, her mother’s partner. From a young age, Orpen has been trained to survive and to fight, becoming especially good with knives. In Last Ones Left Alive, Orpen is 14 years old. Her mother has just died, and she has left the island where she grew up for the mainland. She is carting around Maeve, who has been bitten by a skrake and is slowly turning into one of them, in a wheelbarrow. Her goal is to reach Phoenix City, the only human settlement left in Ireland, and the place Maeve and her mother fled years ago. Orpen is driven by her longing to find other humans, a community, and a place to belong. She also dreams of joining the banshees of Phoenix City, a group of women fighters she’s only seen in faded, hand-made poster left in the ruins on the mainland.

Silent City picks up the action right after the end of Last Ones Left Alive when Orpen has finally found her way to Phoenix City and encountered a band of banshees. Once the prologue is over, we jump ahead six years. By then, Orpen has made a place for herself in the community she fought so hard to find, and has become one of the banshees. But nothing is the way she expected it to be. Phoenix City is kept safe thanks to the banshees and to the walls surrounding the city, but it is a harsh and unforgiving place. The citizens might be protected from the skrake, but they live under an oppressive regime, enduring poverty, hunger, and disease. Phoenix City is ruled by “the management,” a group of male leaders who get access to, and dole out, whatever perks are still available, while the less fortunate literally live and die in the dirt. Reading is forbidden, women are kept as breeders or recruited as banshees, and the management use and abuse the citizens in the name of keeping them safe.

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Six years after her arrival, Orpen is deeply unhappy and disillusioned, her only solace being the companionship of the banshees and her friendship/budding romance, messy and tentative as it is, with fellow-fighter Agata. At night she dreams of her mothers, and home:

“I dream of my mothers, their voices mingling with the shinaun, the constant wind, calling me as if they’re beckoning me home after a day’s play. I dream of being loved.

I wake.”

 Orpen has tried to conform and fit in, but when she is forced to participate in a public execution and is promoted by management, she is drawn into the political machinations of Phoenix City, and it becomes ever more obvious to her that something has to change.

If there’s a weakness in Silent City, it’s that the societal structure and political machinations within Phoenix City feel a bit nebulous. Partly this is because we see everything through the eyes of Orpen who, even after six years, is still an outsider, with a sometimes tenuous grasp of what goes on in the halls of power and elsewhere in the community. Orpen is awkward and uncomfortable in most social situations, something that contributes to her sense of isolation, and that outsider perspective makes her feel a bit detached from what’s going on around her.

That said, it is Orpen’s particular and slightly off-kilter point of view, and the intimate focus on her journey, her longing for goodness and a better way of living, that makes both Silent City and Last Ones Left Alive stand out, giving the books true emotional heft and depth. There’s a sense of quiet desperation and devastation running through both books, and Davis-Goff’s Irish-tinted prose captures Orpen’s internal struggles to find her own strength and purpose with sparse, sharp, sometimes lyrical precision and beauty.

While Silent City is a post-apocalypse story haunted by the presence of the skrake, the book is not really about the skrake. Those decaying, ravenous undead play a more significant role in Last Ones Left Alive as Orpen traverses the kind of bleak, devastated landscape we’ve come to know in The Road and The Walking Dead. The skrake are certainly present in Silent City, and Orpen, with her band of banshees, has some harrowing encounters with the undead, especially when the banshees are scavenging for supplies in the long-abandoned Dublin airport, an edge-of-your-seat sequence that ends in both disaster and glory. What Silent City is really about, at least for me, is community: how people can find a way to live together, not just survive, after the end of the world.

Like many people, I have consumed a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction over the last several years, and the tropes and themes of the genre can sometimes wear me out when it’s relentlessly focused on gore and grimdark horror. Even so, there is something about these kinds of stories that is appealing to me both as a reader and writer. By removing society as we know it, whether it’s obliterated by zombies, catastrophic climate change, nuclear war, or something else, it leaves a canvas where we can express and explore our darkest fears and wildest nightmares.

Lately though, the post-apocalyptic stories I find most interesting are not the ones that focus solely on horrors and cruelty. Rather, I’m drawn to stories about how people find ways to maintain and build communities, to live in the rubble. I sometimes think that writers and movie makers underestimate the resilience of communities, and the endurance (and usefulness) of empathy and cooperation even under dire circumstances. Human history is full of apocalypses and post-apocalypses—war, plague, famine, natural disasters – and in all these situations, human beings continue to find ways to live, and live together.

Some recently published short fiction that explores post-apocalyptic community building with incisive thoughtfulness is “Building” by Marlee Jane Ward in IZ Digital, “The Field Guide for Next Time” by Rae Mariz in khōréō, and “The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer in Uncanny. This theme is also strongly present in Silent City where Orpen longs for, and eventually tries to fight for, a better kind of community than Phoenix City. The book doesn’t totally succeed for me when it comes to how Orpen ends up fighting the powers that be in Phoenix City (it all comes together a bit too neatly for my liking), but the story has a sharp and jagged beauty all its own, and there’s a vulnerability and tenderness to Orpen, beneath the scars and knives, that makes her an interesting protagonist.

Many reviewers drew parallels between Last Ones Left Alive and The Road and it’s a fair comparison: there’s a starkness and quiet brutality to that book, to Orpen’s state of mind as she drags the infected Maeve around in a wheelbarrow, running into skrake, fighting for her life at every turn, that is reminiscent of The Road.

There’s an attractive, stark simplicity to the kind of post-apocalyptic story told in both The Road and Last Ones Left Alive, where loners fight for survival and eventually realize that they need other people. In The Road, that glimpse of a possible community comes right at the very end, like a glimmer of fire in the dark, but the nature of that community is beyond the scope of the novel. Silent City is another kind of post-apocalyptic story altogether, less stark and less simple, because it’s about the nitty-gritty details of community and community building, about the challenges of living together with others in a dangerous world.

Silent City is not a perfect book, but it is a gripping and thought-provoking take on the post-apocalyptic genre that looks beyond the death and gore and devastation of the skrake-apocalypse, daring to imagine new and better ways of living.

“Here we are, alive, putting one foot in front of the other. We’re still moving, se we are.”

Silent City is available now from Flatiron Books.

With episodes that range in length between seven and twenty-one minutes, this season lives up to its name and reputation by presenting the viewer with an impressive mix of horror and sci-fi with tinges of gore and comedic contrast. This contrast adds to the layered nature of the series through overt and covert juxtaposition that gets the viewer thinking.

Animation, Craft & Purpose

Season three is filled to the brim with emotive additions that immerse the viewer in philosophical questioning and more generally, ruminations on those ideas, concepts and objects that are bigger than us.

Beginning with “Three Robots: Exit Strategies” where an important, and albeit, somewhat comedic presentation of an Earth post apocalypse is depicted as three robots traverse the now rough landscape on a touristic jaunt of sorts. This episode puts into perspective much of the global discussions on Artificial Intelligence and how we, as humans, have the ability to make robots that exude much of the same humanity, character traits and identities that are so seemingly sacrosanct to being a human. This episode has the necessary purpose that goes beyond engaging entertainment and therefore serves to force us to criticize contemporary AI growth and naturally, a less than fruitful future which could ultimately emerge.

Moreover, the reiteration of the negative impact of consumer technology was intriguingly presented to the viewer through “Mason’s Rats.” This episode incorporates the robots and death elements where a society of highly intelligent rats take over Mason’s barn. Perhaps what makes this episode so special is the emphasis placed on consumer technology and the nature of late-stage capitalism through the need to constantly buy more and need more despite not necessarily solving more! Whilst more comedic and driven by shock-value gore, this episode accurately portrays universal experience within the aforementioned capitalism. One must acknowledge the depth of purpose and skilled craft within this episode!

“Night of the Mini Dead” is another daring episode that must be commended for strength of animation. Whilst this narrative ends more sardonically and presents the widely shared sci-fi notion of a zombie apocalypse, it serves more to present the viewer with a feast for the eyes than the mind and ears. Marvelous animation brimming with vibrant colors and carefully planned progression allows the reader to be fully absorbed by this episode. Further, the end of the world is presented as minute in the grand scheme of the universe and forces the viewer to contend with their own overt insignificance in the face of the grandness of a cosmos mighty and unknown.

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“Bad Travelling” is an episode that inspires a deep sense of dread in relation to the arcane depths of the still massively unexplored ocean system of our planet through an assumed alien ocean. This nautical fantasy is centered around a crab that insists on passage aboard a ship. This creature proceeds to feast through crew constantly on the verge of mutiny. With the captain finally showing initiative to prevent further life-loss should they reach their next island destination. This episode ensures the reader is not only engaged, but genuinely captivated by the unfolding of this tense narrative.

In addition, “Jibaro” is another episode that has held my interest on multiple rewatching binges of this season. This episode is sensual, strange and rather morose. With tinges of east and south east Asian cultural and environmental inclusions, this eerie quasi-love story presents the reader with a twisted, siren dripping in aureate excess. This siren goes on to seduce and slaughter many men bar one who ends up killing her. Despite this death, the river she calls home resurrects her and ensures her revenge. Despite the wails of the siren, one lone man remains, uninterested, unimpacted. Albert Mielgo, creator of this episode alludes to this episode being a metaphor for a ‘toxic relationship’. However, this mesmerizing animation, that entrances the reader, views as even more so a metaphor for the dangers of power dynamics within relationships. Negative dynamics which are usually reserved exclusively for men. Mielgo’s presentation thus reads as more carefully constructed to challenge the status quo.

Season three is one that satiates the eyes and leaves the viewer yearning for more as we wait in eager anticipation for the fourth installment of this emotive series. With greater emphasis on love and death, this is a season for the thinker, the philosopher, and those with curious imaginations who seek to think beyond the confines of one’s individual reality.