Sorry, Was Engrossed In Sad Book: My April 2025 in Media

Normally, when looking back at my month in media consumption, I have a list of books 4 - 10 long, a show or two, and on the wild occasion, a movie. But this month (and, naturally, the first one I’m talking about in this newsletter/blog thing) things are wildly inverted thanks to two factors:

1. I’ve been reading through a fairly large stack of screenplays for a competition I’m helping judge, which has chewed up all my reading-for-fun-and-general-self-improvement time, and

2. I’ve been knitting a jumper, and something about knitting calls for screen time over audiobooking.

I’ve also consumed an unholy amount of hours in political and economic podcasts, but for the sake of everyone’s sanity, we’re not going to talk about that right now.

I’ve been making monthly montages out of the contents of my phone’s camera roll. Meet April!

BOOKS READ:

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES by L.M. Montgomery (1908)
Format: Audiobook (narrated by Rachel McAdams)

A short story of mine vaguely inspired by Anne Shirley and the Cuthberts was recently accepted for publication in a very cool magazine, so Anne of Green Gables has been on my mind a bit lately. And when the other book I started right before this turned out to be the actually scary kind of horror book, I thought, “Now’s the time for a reread, baby. You deserve something nice.”

And nice it was! The story of a highly imaginative, easily distracted orphan turning up to the farmhouse of two unmarried middle-aged siblings on Prince Edward Island by mistake is as effortlessly charming as its fatally red-haired protagonist. Anne’s romantic monologues are balanced effortlessly by the gruffly practical (but mostly kind-hearted) adults around her, and even more so by the wry commentary of its narrator. An absolute hoot was had, right up until it had me sobbing in the corner of the kitchen. Real life affirming shit. Treat yourself, or, if you have kids and don’t mind overt Christian values, it’s a solid candidate for bedtime reading.

BAT EATER by Kylie Lee Baker (2025)
Format: Paperback

Maybe it’s the absolutely silly cover Hachette chose for this book, but I did not expect this part-serial killer thriller, part-ghost story horror book to give me the willies as badly as it did. And I mean that as a compliment!

Bat Eater (published in the US as Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng) follows Cora, who, after seeing her sister brutally murdered in a hate crime at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, takes a job as a crime scene trauma cleaner in Chinatown where she begins to notice a disturbing pattern of unreported murders that may be connected to the death of her sister — and sees her on the list of potential victims. Which would be stressful enough, but Cora’s superstitious Auntie Zeng (and her superstitious co-workers) keep warning her about “ghost month:” the month in which the unappreciated and hungry dead come back to punish their loved ones. And Cora, with all her mixed feelings, trauma and denial, hasn’t been mourning her sister in any of the ways she should.

Bat Eater is gnarly. It’s goopy, gory, violent, sad, and oozing with dread. Baker has recreated the densely anxious air of COVID-19 lockdowns, painting an empty city in crisis. It’s a fascinating exploration of white supremacy, anti-Asian racism, the particular brand of misogyny that leads to the exploitation of Asian women, political corruption, youth malaise, passivity as a fatal character flaw, and the power of cultural connection. I had a horrible time, which again, I mean as a very high compliment. Top notch contemporary horror, and an absolutely banger use of ghosts.

WE COULD BE RATS by Emily Austin (2025)
Format: Paperback

An absolutely rare month in that I read not one, but TWO brand new releases, and loved the shit out of both. But that was expected in this case, at least. I’ve now read all three of Emily Austin’s published novels and she has made an eager fan out of me.

We Could Be Rats is something of an epistolary piece told in letters and journal entries, and follows two sisters, one of whom is trying to understand the suicide attempt of the other. It’s heavy and emotional, but really beautifully pieced together. I’m so thrilled to see Emily Austin continuing to explore her usual themes (mentally ill Canadian lesbians with big hearts and big trauma Doing Their Best) while really stretching her craft muscles and experimenting with different narrative structures and devices.

I was so engaged (i.e. crying) while reading a certain section of this book that I missed a text from my partner, and when I finally saw it half an hour later could only respond with, “Sorry, was engrossed in sad book.”

Again, highest compliment.

MEDIA WATCHED:

TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN (2017)
Owned on Blu-ray

Like many other David Lynch fans, my partner and I started rewatching Twin Peaks shortly after his death in January, and April brought the soapy and surreal journey to a close. We watched Season 3 as it aired back in 2017, which was a wild, entertaining, often beautiful but ultimately befuddling experience for me. I liked it, but I didn’t get it, and the fact that I didn’t get it frustrated me a little. But I’ve diligently spent these past eight years getting weirder, more creatively open and, I hope, interesting, and so I went into The Return not trying to understand it, but only to experience it. And mates, I loved it. Twin Peaks was always more soap opera than police procedural or small town mystery, and The Return keeps the spirit while beefing up the experimental elements that made seasons one and (parts of) two so special. I don’t love everything about it, and I think Lynch was pretty exploitative of the bodies of Black and Asian women, while giving them little actual screen and character time. But overall, it was a journey well worth taking again.

This is the arm, and it sounds like this: “psbpsbpsbpsbpsbpsbpsb.”

CONCLAVE (2024)
Rented on Apple TV, then immediately purchased on Blu-ray

Continuing on the theme of media I watched because someone died, I used the Pope’s death (RIP to an unprecedentedly pretty progressive one, relatively speaking) and the presence of Isabella Rossellini to sell my partner on finally watching Conclave: a movie centred around the process of electing a new pope. I went into this knowing very little other than the premise, and that people around the time of the Academy Awards had joked about Conclave being behind the self-elimination of a few of the leading nominees, so I assumed it was going to spin into some sort of Drop Dead Gorgeous situation with cardinals. What I got instead was a quiet, beautifully shot piece about grief, duty, and making good choices. I immediately bought it on blu ray so that I can appreciate the shots in non-streaming fuzz (our internet is… not great) and also so I can put it on whenever I feel sad. A feel good movie about papal politics. Who knew!

All those moments will be lost in time, like cardinals in the rain.

THE PITT (2025)
Streamed on MAX

I am a big baby with medical anxiety and an accident prone partner, so when everyone first started talking about (mostly) realtime medical show The Pitt I lasted exactly twenty minutes before I had to turn it off and have a prolonged cuddle with my dog. But then everyone in the discord started watching and raving about it, so I caved and tried again. This time with self-protection measures: I only watched it on my phone or laptop screen (thus reducing chance of seeing anything terrible, because this show has decided to go for a realism I have never craved in medical dramas) and only while knitting, to reduce my chances of paying too much attention to any of the medical talk. So I basically turned this into a radio play that I paid a bit of attention to. Is this the ideal way of watching TV? No. Does it cause me pain as someone who writes TV? Yes. But it eased me in, and then somehow I watched (listened to?) all 15 episodes of it over three days. I’m tempted to give it its own blog because I also happened to watch it the week that Katy Perry and friends went to the exosphere, which is a combo that provoked a lot of Thoughts. But the tl;dr is that I ultimately enjoyed it a lot once I made it baby-proof. The characters are great, the shift format allows for some really interesting cast relays, and I’m genuinely impressed by how a real-time show managed to find an engaging hook/cliffhanger at the end of nearly every episode. And, honestly, I’m just so happy to see another weekly release show with what seems to be a yearly commitment and a decent episode count. TV IS COMING BACK, FOLKS. NATURE IS HEALING.

Middle-age is really working for Noah Wyle, professional TV doctor.

BAND OF BROTHERS (2001)
Streamed on MAX

This show about American paratroopers in WW2 was a prestige television super event in 2001, which I completely missed, having been only fourteen at the time. It is absolutely brimming with baby British actors playing Americans, many of whom went on to be megastars (Andrew Scott, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Tom Hardy) and more than any other show it has made me wonder if I am face-blind because I cannot for the life of me tell the difference between 90% of these muddy brunette men. The production values are very high. The photography is quite beautiful. The performances are very good. I cannot imagine writing a script with this much group chat, so I’m impressed on those fronts, but I don’t know that I love the narrative framing of it all. It’s a good show told messily, but I think that’s probably a purposeful choice in reflecting the chaos of war. It might just be too much of an ensemble show for me. I cannot remember a single person’s name other than Major Winters. Good for knitting in front of, though, if you don’t mind all the screaming.

Noted American Hero, Damien Lewis.

ANDOR and THE LAST OF US (2025)
Streamed on Disney+ and MAX respectively

I am, of course, watching the two big, highly anticipated, mega budget franchise second seasons, and will probably give each a separate blog or two as they’re both prompting a WHOLE LOT of thoughts. But at time of writing, only three episodes of each show are out (with the next batch of Andor dropping today) so all I’ll say right now is that I’m mostly impressed and intrigued, with a few reservations on both sides. But I don’t think anything is going to happen this year that’ll top Mon Mothma getting absolutely crunk and dancing the pain away at her daughter’s childbride wedding in terms of sheer emotional and aesthetic extravaganza.

We call this a Chandrilan Doof.

This piece was originally posted on Substack on April 30, 2025

My Five Favourite Reads of 2025, Q1

JAMES by Percival Everett (2024)
Format: Audiobook (narrated by Dominic Hoffman)

I have to confess upfront that I’ve never read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, of which James is a loose retelling (or perhaps closer to a re-imagining). In fact, prior to hearing a bunch of friends with excellent taste raving about James, my only understanding of the American children’s classic came from a Simpson’s homage and the memory of having seen a VHS cover of baby Elijah Wood in old-timey suspenders standing near a raft at some point in my life.

I did briefly consider reading Huckleberry Finn before I moved forward with James, but a) I’m a firm-ish believer that retellings and reimaginings should be able to stand alone as complete stories in their own right, as well as in conversation with their source texts, and going in sans source text is the best way to test that, and b) I didn’t wanna. So here we are.

James tells the story of “Jim,” an enslaved man in 1860’s Missouri who has secretly educated himself via the extensive library of a judge who lives on (or next to, or owns — I wasn’t too clear on the domestic layout) his owner’s property. Jim doesn’t lead a happy life, but he has found community with the other enslaved folk on the property, joy in his wife and daughter, and a certain amount of safety in knowing he’s considered one of the “good” slaves. The story kicks off, therefore, when Jim hears a rumour that he’s about to be sold.

Rather than be separated from his family, Jim runs away, intending to stay close until he can figure out a solution. It’s a doomed plan to start with, and only gets worse when he comes across his owner’s scrappy ward, thirteen-year-old “Huck,” who has convincingly faked his own death with pig’s blood and run away at the news that his violent, alcoholic father is coming back to town. Aware he must now be wanted for the murder of a white boy — the mere accusation of which is more than enough to see any Black man hanged in the south — Jim resolves to escape to a free northern state and work to earn the money to purchase his wife and daughter’s freedom.

What ensues is a kind of road trip story in which Jim and Huck, travelling mostly at night and largely along the Mississippi river, stumble from mishap to catastrophe as they make their way north. It’s an interesting pairing: Huck has all the privilege and confidence of whiteness, but with a dead mother and an abusive, deadbeat father is desperate to be loved, while Jim, who does feel some responsibility and affection towards this boy, has already spent all the love he has to give his wife and daughter, and is just trying not to die. Where Huck sees adventure and a growing camaraderie, Jim feels danger, obligation, and a growing resentment.

I’ve always been a big fan of road trip stories (even when the road in question is in fact a river), but they’re incredibly tricky to get right. The physical journey can lull the writer (and the reader) into a false sense of forward motion while the character journey itself stagnates. It can so easily go from a story to a sequence of events, distracting from its emptiness with interesting places and zany new characters. But Percival Everett manages to deliver the parade of location, characters and hijinks while keeping everything firmly grounded in the death of Jim, and the birth of James.

The name “Jim”, of course, wasn’t the name given to our protagonist by his parents. If they gave him one, he never heard it. “Jim” was assigned by one of his owners, as are most of the names of the Black characters we meet in the book. At multiple points of the book he tries on new ones, wondering what name he might choose for himself if ever given the luxury. The title of the book, of course, reveals his decision long before he makes it. But “James” is more than just a name.

Our protagonist, much like all the slaves we meet in the book who care about their survival, has a mask he wears in white company. The mask is cheerful, subservient, and speaks in a very specific dialect (called “slave talk” in the book). Everything about it is engineered to appeal to the idea of white superiority, and Jim is so good at it he gives anti-diction lessons to the Black children on his owner’s property, drilling them to make sure they never talk back to a white American, to never say anything that might imply they’re capable of intelligent — or critical — thought.

The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.”
“February, translate that.”
“Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”
“Nice.”

Despite having spent no small amount of time in each other’s company, Huck doesn’t hear Jim speak in his real vernacular until they run away together. The first slip comes during a fever, in which a delirious Jim argues philosophy and race politics with a vision of Voltaire: easily explained away to a thirteen-year-old as a bout of mysterious madness. But the longer they spend on the run, and the more Jim sees of America — the more he sees his people mocked and reviled while their culture is appropriated for entertainment, the more atrocities against Black bodies he witnesses and experiences at the hands of cruel, ignorant people who believe their supremacy is natural and god-given — the harder it is for him to keep the mask in place.

“I did not look away. I wanted to feel the anger. I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it.”

The racist stereotype of Black men the world over is one centred around violence and anger. It’s an anger that is seen as innate, rather than ever having been earned: an unsubtle and intended reminder that Black people were, until only a few generations ago, legally and socially considered to be something lesser than human. Everett purposely subverts this stereotype in a way I found extremely effective. When we meet Jim, he’s not an angry man. Frustrated, sure, but his negative feelings are largely managed and vented through humour. He is resigned to the impossible situation he exists in, and is trying, somehow, to make the best of it. But, as he learns in the arduous journey that follows, there is no best of it. The system is built on violence, theft, suffering and cruelty. When James finally emerges from chrysalis of Jim, he is fucking furious, and he has earned every piece of it.

By the time I’d finished James, I was glad I’d ignored the brief temptation to read Huckleberry Finn first. There was something so satisfying, so subversive, so thematically appropriate in having James tell his side of this story first. It’s a book I plan to read again, though I’m of two minds as to whether I want to hear Huck’s side of things before I do. On one hand, I’d like to be able to appreciate the conversation being had between the two works, and to consider Everett’s adaptive choices. On the other, this work is a masterpiece all on its own, and the thought seeing James completely disappear behind the mask of Jim breaks my heart.

And on a third, less poignant hand… I still don’t really wanna.

If you are planning on checking James out, I highly recommend the audio version. Dominic Hoffman gives a fantastic performance, and the verbal code switching is really something to hear.

Content Warnings: Slavery, Racism, Racial slurs, Rape, Violence, Murder, War, Child abuse, Fire/Fire injury

A SUNNY PLACE FOR SHADY PEOPLE by Mariana Enriquez, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell (2024)
Format: Paperback

Two things causes me to pick this book off the shelf. The first is that I’ve been eyeing off Mariana Enriquez’s absolute tome of a book, Our Share of Night for quite a while now, but as I’m so terrible at committing to books higher than 400 pages, I figured that dipping my toe into her writing via her short works might be more sensible. The second is that gloriously trippy, gross cover, featuring art by Pablo Gerardo Camacho.

A Sunny Place for Shady People is Enriquez’s third collection of short horror stories, and while none of the stories in this book directly relate to each other, they all (bar one set in Los Angeles) take place in Argentina post 2020. These are, almost across the board, ghost stories, with Argentina their haunted house. Each story is a character piece in which Enriquez paints a rich portrait of her (mostly female) protagonists, and in doing so, weaves a tapestry of everyday people doing their best to survive in a country beset with governmental corruption, institutionalised neglect, and in the aftermath of a pandemic that made everything worse. Her prose (translated beautifully by Megan McDowell, who also translates for the fascinating Samanta Schweblin) is rich and emotional, and incredibly effective at conveying information without bogging the reader down. By the time each story ends it feels like you’ve spent time with someone real, in someplace real, and the regret at moving on from them is only relieved by a lifting of dense foreboding. I read this collection straight through, and the breaks between stories are like coming up for air before plunging back down into a too-warm, too-reedy lagoon.

But for all their sense of dread, these horror stories aren’t, for the most part, particularly frightening. Enriquez doesn’t hasten to or linger over the grotesque. Her focus seems to be on the human element, on connection, on emotion, on grief. All are largely left open-ended, leaving you with questions, but also the tools to answer some of them. She’s a wonderfully pensive writer, a masterful character artist, and now I have to go and buy her giant bloody novel to see what she does with a long form narrative. Because, my god, is she brilliant with just a few pages.

Content Warnings: Body horror, Death, Blood, Rape, Death of parent, Suicide, Forced institutionalisation, Animal death, Cancer

ONLY THE ASTRONAUTS by Ceridwen Dovey (2024)
Format: Paperback

I’ve been aware of Ceridwen Dovey for years. Being an Australian with an aggressively Welsh hard-C name means, among other things, that you tend you take note of other Australians with aggressively Welsh hard-C names. But I’d never read any of her work until February, when a whim to read nothing but sci-fi led me to pick up this book, which I’d seen in my local bookshop the year before and bought more out of a sense of solidarity than anything else. I had no idea what to expect. I had a vague recollection that her previous, well-received collection, Only the Animals, was written from the perspectives of various animals, but I wasn’t sure what the tone was. And, if I can be honest, I don’t always trust Australian accolades when it comes to genre fiction. I’ve always found my country, as an audience and a publishing industry, to be quite snobbish and embarrassed by anything home-grown that lies in realm of whimsy, the fantastical, or strange.

Well, more fool me! Only the Astronauts is delightfully absurd, poignantly bittersweet, and, in bits, really fucking odd. Tens across the board.

Only the Astronauts contains five short stories (or, more specifically, three short stories, a novelette, and a screenplay written by a tampon) which make up five clear parts of an overarching narrative.

“My love, we need to talk. I’ve tried and tried to call you from the Tesla’s dashboard phone, but I haven’t had a clear connection in over six years.”

Beginning with Starman, a story written from the perspective of Elon Musk’s jilted lover (the mannequin he strapped to a Tesla and shot into space) and ending with Hackgold | Hacksilver, Voyager-1’s final, attempted missive to her long-lost sister after leaving the solar system and discovering a colony of aliens, Dovey creates her own golden record: a loving tribute to, and searing indictment of, humanity. This glorious species that is capable of sending a hope and a prayer into the unknown, knowing they won’t be alive to hear any answer; who can send astronauts into space so that they can consider how very small our presence in the universe is; who can project feelings of real love, real empathy, real grief onto a probe, or a station, or a rover, but so often fail when it comes to our fellow humans. Who find a way into space and onto the pristine miracle of the moon only to leave behind masses of garbage, and send a woman into space for a week with a hundred tampons, and then associate her forever with someone else’s sexist blunder. I live for books that are able to balance joy with sorrow, and humour with gravity, and through her rich cast of inanimate spacefarers, Dovey strikes it perfectly.

Last year’s Booker Prize was won by Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a book that won over Percival Everett’s James and has quite a bit in common with Requiem, Dovey’s second, and longest story in this collection. Orbital is a slice of life novella that covers one average day on the International Space Station (or, sixteen orbits of Earth). It slips between the perspectives of its astronauts and cosmonauts as they look back at Earth, pondering their planet, life, politics, family, climate catastrophe, and each other.

“I like the modular way I came into being, and how I proved that mutual usefulness can sometimes be more appealing than mutual destruction.”

Requiem is written from the perspective of the International Space Station in the year 2031, on its final day with its final crew. The ISS is due to be retired, and will soon be allowed to fall through the atmosphere and into the sea at the point furthest from inhabited land. What follows is a memorial that goes both ways: the ISS reflects on and pays tribute to its many inhabitants over the decades, while its final crew pays loving tribute to it by writing sonnets: all of which are read aloud for its benefit even though the astronauts and cosmonauts have no idea the ISS is listening, and has just written its own in return.

“I don’t want to cause a global panic as I spiral out of control above towns and cities. I don’t want to destroy any living thing in the course of my own destruction. It would undo all the good I have done, welcoming humans into me, nurturing and sustaining them. A good death bookends a good life.”

Both Orbital and Requiem are ponderous and hopeful, both reflecting on the isolation and distilled humanity of the inhabitants of the ISS alongside the odd conundrum that comes with being a human who yearns for space, only to get there and yearn for Earth. But for me, perhaps because of its unique narrator, and perhaps because the narrative freedom allows for a more satisfying and purposeful structure than a day-in-the-life situation, Requiem is the stronger (and stranger) of the two. Like all of the other stories in the collection, it would stand wonderfully on its own. But taken in the context of the others, I think it’s one of the biggest reasons the ending of the collection packed such an emotional punch for me. This book had me sniffling in the kind of way that makes my partner panic from the other side of the house.

Only the Astronauts has, I believe, only been published in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, so if you’re outside of these areas, it may be tricky to get a copy of. But if you like books that are sad and strange and lovely, I encourage you to try. It is, after all, a runaway hit amongst Australians with aggressively Welsh hard-C names.

Content Warnings: Death

KINDRED by Octavia E. Butler (1979)
Format: Audiobook (narrated by Kim Staunton) and eBook

Octavia E. Butler is a giant of speculative and science fiction, a writer who was so good at paying attention to the world around her and connecting dots between past, present and future that she has been hailed in this, the year of our Lord 2025 (or, more relevantly, the year of the first entry in Butler’s seminal Parable of the Sower), as a prophet.

Kindred, however, looks backwards rather than forwards. Written and set in the late 1970’s, it follows Dana, a young, educated Black woman in California who is yanked through time and space to a Maryland plantation in 1815. Her first visit lasts only minutes, allowing her just enough time to save a young white boy from drowning. But in an unexplainable phenomenon that takes place over only weeks in Dana’s modern day timeline, she is pulled back in time for first hours, and then months at a time. Her anchor is the white boy, Rufus: an ancestor who is able to call her to him when he feels his life is in danger, and Dana is only able to leave him when she fears her life is in danger — a dangerous stipulation that she’s only able to game a few times. And so begins a complex relationship between the two that spans Rufus’s natural life. Dana’s survival depends on his, at least until she can guarantee he’s had the children who make up the next branch of her family tree. But as Rufus grows from an affectionate boy to a slave-owning, manipulative man, things become much messier.

“Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.”

I don’t think I picked this book up so soon after reading James on purpose, but doing so made for an excellent companion read. Whereas James is a road story heavily focused on the Black male experience, touching on and portraying, but not really exploring the horrors facing enslaved Black women, Kindred has two static domestic settings and is almost wholly concerned with Black women and the communities they forge to survive. Dana, forced to live as a slave while she’s on Rufus’s plantation, is thrust into the orbit of several Black women: chief amongst them Alice, her once-free ancestor, now owned and lusted after by Rufus. With her is Sarah, the cook, who has seen all of her children sold except her daughter Carrie, who was born mute. The relationships between Dana and these women can’t always, or, in Alice’s case, ever, be called friendship. But there is sisterhood, a sharing of knowledge, a sense of support, and unflinching honesty. Dana enters into this community not-so-privately believing that her education, knowledge of history, and modernity sets her above these women who have, in her eyes, allowed themselves, if not to become enslaved, then to remain so. Exposure and experience, of course, challenge these perceptions. When all of society is built on the back of your labour, when every law exists to categorise you as an animal and unquestioningly forgive your abuse, your rape, your murder, then what can you do but try to cling to the few moments of joy and connection your life might allow?

I won’t spoil what is a really excellent progression in the story, but one of the most fascinating, sickening themes Kindred explores is how deep the ideas of white supremacy run, and how quickly people will accept the idea of a natural hierarchy so long as they feel they’re at the top of it (or, at least, not the bottom). Much like in James, the Black characters in the story are just trying to survive while the white characters are constantly trying to explain and justify their position: they are inherently smarter than Black folk(despite all evidence to the contrary), stronger (despite needing Black bodies to perform all their labour), closer to God (despite all the rape, torture, murder, abuse). Even the white “allies” in both stories fold at the first test of principle. White supremacist ideologies run through the veins of our societies, and it’s as true in 2025 as it was in 1979 and 1815. Kindred doesn’t hold solutions to that: only a mirror. And that, I think, is what gets me most about Octavia E. Butler’s work. For all her incredible imagination and powerful writing, she’s never really been a prophet. She’s only ever shown us the existing rot.

Content Warnings: Slavery, Racism, Racial slurs, Rape, Sexual assault, Suicide, Child death, Vomit, Fire/Fire injury

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT SPACE by Emily Austin (2024)
Format: Paperback

Call me a sad white lady (it’s true), but I’m a sucker for a book that sounds like it could be a Phoebe Bridgers song. I’m also, increasingly, an absolute sucker for Emily Austin, whose debut novel Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead was one of my favourite reads of 2024.

Interesting Facts About Space is a contemporary litfic following Enid: a twenty-six year-old half-deaf neurodivergent lesbian with extreme commitment issues, an estranged and quite recently dead dad, a depressed mum she’s possibly keeping alive entirely via space facts, a bigoted and resentful step-mother, extremely kind half-sisters who keep trying to be be in her life, a backlog of embarrassing teenage youtube videos she can’t delete, an over-reliance on true crime media, a phobia of bald men, a possible stalker and repeat home invader, undisclosed trauma, and the wife of someone she’s been hooking up with calling her on the phone.

There’s a lot going on in this book (which, paradoxically, has been accused of having “no plot” by several of its reviewers on Goodreads), but it’s a carefully controlled chaos, with every thread connected in a way that, when tugged, pulls the whole web of Enid’s stressors tighter and tighter. This is a story about an overwhelmed young woman desperately in need of help, but who can’t conceive that she has the right to ask for it.

“I worry that I am a shell for something bad. That deep down, in the spot where most people keep their souls, I keep a weird little bug. I picture him there, leaning on the apple core of my soul, crunching on what remains of what’s good of me.”

Emily Austin is, for me, one of those authors who writes in a way that causes me deep emotional turmoil and humiliation, because she captures how I think and feel so perfectly that it is occasionally difficult to look at (and yet, impossible to look away). She so perfectly captures the neurodivergent brain on the page in a way I can see would be frustrating for readers who don’t know what it means to live with one. Interesting Facts About Space is largely internal, its protagonist self-centred and self-reflective in a way she is painfully aware of. The scenes are short and snappy, zipping through Enid’s work, social and private life, lingering in moments when she’s alone and thinking too much. It has all the hallmarks of what people seem to hate so much about litfic, and yet it builds quietly and beautifully to an emotional catharsis that says, “I see that you are overwhelmed, and afraid, and a bit broken in places. I see that you don’t feel like you should be allowed to be an adult with all the shitty choices you make and all the things you don’t know how to do yet. I see that you don’t feel like you fit into the shape of what it means to be a woman, let alone a queer woman. I see that you’re struggling just to exist in a world that doesn’t accomodate all your differences. Now see me, see that I feel like this too, and so does she, and her, and them, and him. None of us know what we’re doing, but it’s important we keep fighting and trying and caring about each other anyway, even if we fail. Your life, no matter how quiet, how seemingly unimportant, means everything. You mean everything.”

Anyway, I made the mistake of finishing this book on a plane, and therefore weeping so much the woman next to me leaned very firmly in the other direction.

A solid choice on her part, to be fair.

Content Warnings: Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Abandonment, Suicidal thoughts, Homophobia, Death of parent, Self harm, Fire/Fire injury, Vomit

This piece was originally published in two parts on Patreon and Substack on the 18th and 21st of April, 2025

Marilla, Haymitch and Me: On my disinterest in following beloved middle-aged characters back to adolescence.

I reread Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maude Montgomery this week — partly because I needed something new to listen to while I did a bunch of gardening and housework and the audiobook was included in my Audible subscription, and partly because I’ve been reading a properly scary horror novel and I needed something lovely and life-affirming to balance out my severe case of jibblies — and I was reminded that, for all my love of open-hearted, chatterbox Anne Shirley, it is with Marilla Cuthbert whom my heart resides.

Marilla Cuthbert is your favourite grump’s favourite grump. We meet her at an age undefined, except that it is at least above fifty. Her hair is greying and she favours severely practical gowns which mirror her severely practical personality. She values blunt honesty, short sentences, a love of the Lord (but don’t be too flashy or loud about it), and economy in all things—including affection, and yet is rarely stingy in kindness. She suffers regular migraines and is interested in politics, though engaging with it too openly is one of the many pleasures she denies herself. But like many a beloved grump, Marilla is fiercely loyal and cares deeply for the few people who manage to get past her tough exterior. She’s a fascinating character, well-developed and real, and we get to see a surprising amount of her interiority for a children’s novel.

Sometime during this reread, a memory of a Twitter (RIP) interaction came back to me. It must have been in 2020, during my first time reading the book. I had just shared my love of Marilla Cuthbert publicly for the first time, and it was met by a well-intended and completely inoffensive suggestion that I look into an unofficial prequel published just a few years earlier: Marilla of Green Gables by Sarah McCoy. The synopsis suggests that it uses the few details about Marilla’s early life provided in Anne of Green Gables to construct a childhood and young adulthood for her. I possibly promised to look into it (which I clearly did not do, because I’d never read the synopsis until now) and forgot the interaction entirely until this week. But the memory of it wasn’t just triggered by the rediscovery of my dear Marilla, but by two other recent occurrences.

The first being that, for the past past couple of weeks, nearly every one of my reader friends has been reading Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins’ fifth Hunger Games instalment (and second prequel).

The second is that I turned thirty-eight. But we’ll get back to that.

Sunrise on the Reaping follows another notorious grump back into their youth. When we first meet Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games, he’s a mess. Forty years old, prematurely aged and permanently drunk. He’s callous and crude, but as our protagonist (a sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who is much less charming than Anne Shirley, but no less loveable or persistent) forces her way further beneath his skin, we come to see that he is also clever, wryly funny, and deeply traumatised. Not just from his own time in the titular hunger games, but from two decades of caring too much about the yearly pair of local children placed under his (almost sole) care to train for the games, all of whom he has had to watch die. But over the course of the trilogy, and through Katniss’s eyes, we see Haymitch find a ragged sort of hope again. We watch him come back to life, or at least, find something left in the world to live for. We see a rebellion that he has helped shape take hold, and we see him continue to live in the new world that emerges from it. It’s difficult: the demons and the trauma persist, but we see him try, and keep trying.

And while I don’t deny that Haymitch and Marilla have lived rich lives nor judge anyone who wants to spend a great deal more time with them, when I think of following Haymitch or Marilla back into their childhoods I can’t help but flinch.

To be clear, I’m not opposed to prequels as a general rule. I’ve enjoyed a few, including Suzanne Collins’s other prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. But I suppose what I’m reacting to here is a combination of two factors:

1. Perceived Superfluity

Marilla and Haymitch are fully-formed, nuanced characters already. They live and breathe as complete people, and in both cases the defining moments of their youth (or at least, the ones expanded upon in their respective prequel novels) are already told in the course of their existing story. Marilla tells Anne about her ill-fated romance with Gilbert’s father, and Katniss watches a supercut of footage of Haymitch’s time in the hunger games.

…I feel weird. It seems like some major invasion of Haymitch’s privacy. I don’t know why it should, since the whole thing was public. But it does.

Haymitch is not a real person. He doesn’t have privacy to be breached by me, but still, I don’t need the nine-and-a-half pages Collins wrote on Haymitch’s (particularly bloodthirsty) hunger games to be blown out to over five-hundred to empathise with him as a forty-year-old alcoholic with PTSD and depression. I can draw enough from that succinct summary and from the fresh trauma Katniss is working her way through to fill in any gaps. I really don’t need to see that man’s family and girlfriend murdered to find the Capitol any more repulsive or draw any more lines between Collins’ dystopia and the world we live in. I don’t need to see Marilla’s heartbreak to feel any differently about her as a gruff spinster. LM Montgomery and Suzanne Collins gave me everything I needed, and to follow these complex and original portrayals with teenagers Frankensteined together from the crumbs of pre-existing canon, doomed to exist entirely within the context of their future selves, just seems like a huge fucking bummer.

2. Personal Offence On Behalf Of The Middle-Aged

Back to the turning thirty-eight thing. I’ve felt the approach of middle-age for some time now (which is not a way of saying perimenopause is upon me—I think—although the absolute bastard that is Meta’s algorithm sure seems convinced that it is) and have been jokingly referring to myself as such for at least a couple years, but at thirty-eight, I think it’s officially official. No, don’t cry for me. I am, statistically, in the middle stretch of my life, which will hopefully extend into my sixties if we’re working on a thirds-based model, and I’m more than fine with it. Even when the most powerful people in the world seem to take the fact that they exist on the only known celestial body in the universe to support complex and intelligent life as some sort of challenge, every year on this magical rock is a gift, and I like being thirty-nearly-forty a whole lot more than I liked any part of my twenties, and all the parts of my teens that didn’t involve not having to pay for my own stuff.

With the onset of middle-age, I have found myself thusly less interested in stories about the very young and more interested in stories about people in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties (and above, though at that point in media they mostly seem to solve mysteries and/or die, but do send me recs for anything that doesn’t fit that bill that you think is interesting).

Marilla and Haymitch are not the protagonists of their stories, and, while I am very aware that because one exists in a children’s story and the other in one for teenagers any books following them would therefore have to be in the same format, the idea that for either of them to become one they must slough off all of their years of experience and return to the (benevolent) ignorance and freshness of adolescence makes me feel so sad.

So while the rest of my book reading circles follow Haymitch back to his bloody adolescence, and though one one random, kind twitter-user urged me to relax into Marilla’s early days, I’ll be staying where I am, keeping them in my mind and admiring them as the societally over-the-hill creatures we are.

ANCILLARY THOUGHTS AND FOOTNOTES:

• The Anne of Green Gables audiobook is narrated by Rachel McAdams in a wonderful use of her skills (but with a few moments of Mean Girl resurgence thanks to Diana absolutely excommunicating that one girl over stealing her milk bottle spot one time).

• Re: my use of Audible, my local library system (I love and appreciate the library, to be clear) does not have much in the way of an audiobook selection, so while I’m not a fan of Amazon’s anything, they are my current best option for book listening.

• The horror book that drove me to Anne is Bat Eater (and other names for Cora Zeng) by Kylie Lee Baker. It is excellent, and also very violent and gory and scary and sad. It’s a book I want to recommend to everyone, but cannot in good conscience because of the intensity level. But if horror is your thing and/or you have a strong stomach, consider checking it out.

• The Ballads of Songbirds and Snakes, following elderly villain President Snow back to his school days was, funnily enough, an inverse of the situation spoken about above. I was, then and now, the only person I know who was even remotely interested in seeing Snow’s history, and one of the few who liked the book (despite quite a few flaws, including a pretty steep drop in the quality of the writing and the reveal of Collins’ unfortunate fondness for dropping as many pieces of foreshadowing to Katniss and the 74th hunger games as possible, thus turning Katniss from a random kid who just so happened to be the final spark needed to ignite the rebellion into President Snow’s personal worst nightmare). Having written this little piece now, though, I wonder if I’m more open to Snow’s backstory because we see so little of it in The Hunger Games. He’s an enigma, compelling but sparingly drawn, and with much of his perceived charisma and complexity coming from his on-screen counterpart. The incandescent Donald Sutherland passionately pursued the role of Snow, and was such a get that the role was expanded with original scenes — none of which added to his backstory, but to his present state of power and control. There was very little to contradict with Snow. He was a blank, charming, murderous slate, and like Collins, I find something quite interesting in the idea of following the story of an ambitious young man who is given such a frank insight into the evils of the society he aspires to rise in, along with every possible chance to do the right thing, and chooses money, power and pain anyway. It’s not an enjoyable story, for sure, and delivered with very little subtlety, but it compelled me. But maybe I’ll feel differently about it when I’m closer to Snow’s age. Check back in 40 years, won’t you?

  That said, for all I found Ballad interesting, I didn’t find it at all necessary. Like too many prequels, it exists entirely within the context of The Hunger Games but adds little to the experience of reading them (besides retrospectively added easter eggs, curios, and occasional continuity confusion/contradiction). While I’ve reread and enjoyed The Hunger Games quite a few times (I think last year or the year before might have been the most recent occasion), the compulsion to revisit Ballad has never yet come over me.

• I still read (and enjoy!) at least a few YA and childrens’ book per year despite having no children in my life to read them to, and all of my published books to date have been written with older children and teenagers in mind. They’re a great group of people and a wonderful audience, and I hope nothing in this piece implies otherwise.

• If you are the twitter user who kindly suggested Marilla’s prequel, please don’t feel bad for sending me a relevant suggestion you thought I might like. I have enjoyed writing this blog post enormously, so in that way you have very much contributed to me having a good time.
  

This piece was originally posted to my Patreon and Substack on April 5, 2025

Mark Scout's Monster: On the Severance Season 2 Finale and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Warning: Contains spoilers for seasons one and two of Severance, up to and including the season two finale.

I, like every other corporate-hating nerd who also still has an ethically-disastrous reliance on Apple technology, have been watching Severance. I got in on the ground floor of this one, and have been watching weekly since the beginning of season 1. It's a show that lights up all my synapses. Not because I respond particularly well to a mystery box, and not just because it's one of the most beautifully shot and art directed shows I've seen on television, but because I'm an absolute sucker for well-written stories in which good-hearted characters do their best in impossible situations. On that front, Severance has delivered deliciously.

The nature of Severance is that it is a show divided by time and place. After losing his wife Gemma to a car accident, one of our dual protagonists, Mark Scout, has signed up for the wildly experimental and ethically dubious "severance" program at super-cult/corporation Lumon. This creates our second protagonist, Mark S (both played by Adam Scott). The Marks are a divided consciousness sharing a single body in the supposed pursuit of work-life balance. Mark Scout, the "outie", has control of his body during all out of work hours. His consciousness contains all memories of his life up until the moment of severance, at which point he loses whatever happens on the severed floor of the Lumon building. Those belong entirely to Mark S.

Mark S is less than two years old, and lives a bizarre, contextless existence in a fluorescent subterranean labyrinth. He has no memories in common with Mark Scout, and has only a nebulous sort of knowledge of the world. He has never seen anything outside of the floor. He has never (until the ORTBO episode) experienced natural daylight. He has never slept. He is the direct product of Mark Scout's debilitating grief and loneliness, and yet he is inherently a sweet creature. Kind, optimistic, a little awkward. He is, as we eventually learn of all the innies, a sort of pure, child-like version of his outie: the thems they were before all the complexities of life shaped them into something different.

By the very nature of the concept, direct communication between our two protagonists (or, indeed, any innie-outie combo) is nigh-on impossible. Lumon forbids it in-world except for in very specific circumstances, and takes great steps to stop it from ever happening without their direct mediation. In this way, although they separately begin trying much earlier on (Mark S in Season 1, Mark Scout in Season 2), Severance is able to hold off on the Marks holding a conversation until the finale episode of Season 2.

This conversation, which we've been waiting for for over THREE YEARS (because we live in a bizarro world where TV shows don't get made on anything even resembling a schedule anymore), goes spectacularly badly. And I think it's one of my favourite sequences in the show, because for me, this is the sequence where Mark S grows up. Or, to be more specific, where he has that last shred of childlike hope and optimism torn out of him.

It's also where I did a Leo point at the screen and yelled "FRANKENSTEIN."

In Season 1, we see Mark S's love interest and series baddie (complimentary) Helly R receive direct communication from her outie after a thwarted series of resignation attempts ends in an attempted suicide/murder. In this video, played to the entire Macrodata Refinement team (which Mark S is technically sort of in charge of), Helly's outtie tells her in no uncertain terms that she is not in control of their life. To Helly's outtie, and, indeed, for all legal purposes, she is not a person. She does not have rights.

Mark S sees this and feels enormous sympathy, but doesn't seem to consider for a single hot second that his outtie could share the same viewpoint. So when Mark S's eyes are opened to the fact that he and the other severed workers are being wildly mistreated, he assumes his outtie will help him. Season 1 climaxes with a plan for the innies to have their consciousnesses switched out-of -hours, find someone close to their outties to explain everything to, and trust their outties and loved ones to take care of the rest. It's an optimistic plan hatched by sweet and trusting minds.

In Mark S's case, it more or less goes as intended, and he shares the innie's plight to Mark Scout's cool sister Devon. But what also happens is that, upon seeing a picture of Mark Scout's dead wife, we and Mark S realise that she is, in fact, still alive and was, until recently, working on the severed floor as wellness officer "Miss Casey." Mark S manages to shriek this to a room full of people before he is forcibly switched back. This moment is the HOLY SHIT OMG WHAT A TWIST!!! cliffhanger of the entire season (I was, to be clear, screaming), and the quest to find Gemma/Miss Casey and get her out of the Lumon building takes precedence for both Mark Scout and (to a lesser extent) Mark S in season 2. It's the entire reason Mark Scout (with a lot of help from his sister and a pissed-off former Lumon employee they've roped into an alliance) makes contact with Mark S for their ill-fated conversation.

The blame doesn't only rest on Mark Scout here. Mark's sister and fan-favourite Devon, in whom Mark S put all of his trust to help him out, fails him first. She (as far as he's aware) yoinks him out of the severed floor to face his terrifying old boss (instigator of all that wild mistreatment), and asks if he remembers the last thing he said to her: "She's alive." In the time since Mark S has confided in Devon, things have only gotten worse for him at Lumon. He has been lied to, manipulated, and sexually assaulted by Helly's outie. One of his co-workers has, for all intents and purposes, been murdered for insubordination. But Devon doesn't ask about how all of that's going. She's an ally to the innies, sure, but it's all ideological to her, and she has a far more pressing issue: she might be able to get her dead friend back. She might be able to make her brother happy again. Mark S's problems can wait, surely, until that happens.

So that's the greeting Mark S receives before being handed a camcorder and left alone. It's not a great start, but he's nervously excited to play the video and meet, for the first time ever, his outie. The guy who created him, and who must have his back.

What he gets is a set of instructions and unpadded, fairly confronting news. Mark Scout explains to Mark S that they have a plan to get Gemma/Miss Casey out of Lumon. All Mark S has to do is risk his life getting to the super secret part of the severed floor, and then escort her back through said floor to the fire exit. Oh, and doing this will probably--hopefully!--bring down Lumon and end the severed program. Not to worry, though! Mark Scout has been undergoing a process that will subsume Mark S back into his consciousness, so he won't die, per se, but everyone he loves will. Including Helly, who Mark Scout is very much not down to pursue any kind of relationship with anyway. But, hey! He's so psyched his innie got to experience a little crush!

Mark S, Mark Scout tells him -- in far more, and friendlier, words than Helly's outtie -- is not a person. He is not, and will not, be in control of their life. He does not have rights. Mark S hears this loud and clear, and he calls bullshit.

Reader, I was screaming.

In Mary Shelley's seminal science fiction work Frankenstein, the titular Dr. Victor Frankenstein thwarts god and nature by creating new life via a patchwork of stolen corpse bits and experimental technology. Unlike Mark Scout, Frankenstein is motivated not by grief or loneliness, but an ambition that goes beyond hubris. Where they overlap is the absolute lack of thought either of them put into the ramifications of creating a new life form. Frankenstein, like Mark Scout, feels no love, affection, or even responsibility for his creature. He abandons it completely, leaving it to make sense of the world alone, and when it returns to negotiate with its creator, it is refused, mocked, and reviled. Despite all evidence that Frankenstein's creature is capable of highly intelligent thought and deep feeling, Victor Frankenstein refuses to acknowledge it as a person. He utterly denies its (actually fairly reasonable) request for a mate so that it can enjoy company that won't scream their head off when they see its corpsey visage (not its fault!). It is in this moment that Frankenstein truly creates his monster. Not at its birth, not even at his first act of cruelty towards it, but in this final refusal to allow it even a semblance of personhood or happiness.

"He's a child," Mark Scout exclaims when Mark S refuses to let him take the lead, demanding instead to know that all the innocent people on the severed floor won't be sacrificed so that one version of Miss Casey can live. But he's not a child. Not anymore. He has valid questions, and now he knows that he and the other innies are truly alone in the world. Even those sympathetic to them see them as less than the consciousnesses that created them. Even their allies see their deaths as an acceptable outcome.

Frankenstein's monster murders Frankenstein's wife. He does this to punish his creator, to force him to share in the lonely misery the monster has been condemned to.

Mark S saves Mark Scout's wife, but he refuses to follow her out of the building. He denies Mark Scout his chance to be with Gemma after so long apart, turning away from the fire escape door to prioritise his own life, his own love.

We end Season 2 with Mark S fleeing into the labyrinth of the severance floor with no destination in mind and, it seems, no clear intention of ever ceding his shared body again. Mark S doesn't have to kill his creator in order to find a sense of release. He only has to keep existing. And I, for one, am so intrigued to see where we go from here.

Some other thoughts about the finale and/or Frankenstein that I couldn’t find a home for in the above essay:

• I absolutely love that, of the communication we've seen between innies and their outies so far in the show, Dylan is one to validates his innie and show him a modicum of respect. I love the entire MDR team, but Dylan (played by Zach Cherry, who also has my whole heart over on Amazon’s Fallout) continues to be an absolute delight, and his story this season was really lovely. Extra props to whoever thought to cast Merritt Wever as his outie’s wife, who always brings such a gorgeous, grounded energy to everything.

• Mark S gets the absolute snot beaten out of him in the attempt to save Gemma/Miss Casey, to the point where he is very nearly murdered in cold blood by an unsevered Lumon employee. And who saves his life? Another innie (played by the wonderful and well-used Gwendolyn Christie). Naturally.

• Mary Shelley was on the periphery of a great deal of the Luddite movement (in which the textile workers of the early 1800's sought to dissuade the early industrialists from replacing them with machines and lower paid, unskilled workers by use of very large hammers), and Frankenstein can quite easily be read as a Luddite text. The Luddites (and Frankenstein) didn't argue against technological advancements in and of themselves, but against the unethical use of them, and the lack of thought or care for the people being displaced and exploited as a result. This is a core tenant of a great deal of science fiction and speculative fiction in general (Mary Shelley is, in all cool circles, seen as the mother of science fiction) but makes it a particularly good pairing with Severance.

• Helly and Gemma got fairly sidelined in this essay, but please trust that I am a huge fan of both characters, and I fully understand (and sympathise with) the Marks conundrum. I feel like the answer is very obviously a body-sharing throuple, but we’ll see where they go with it.

• Please note that I am not actually scolding Devon or Mark Scout for their actions, I find them both incredibly compelling as characters. Characters should fuck up! Royally! Often! That's where the humanity and the drama comes from.

• I really love this show.

This essay was first posted on Patreon on March 23, 2025.