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INTERVIEW: Editors Christopher Golden and Brian Keene and anthology contributors

For fans of Stephen King, there’s a nearly universal question: “How did you feel the first time you read The Stand?” It is the kind of novel one returns to with fresh eyes and older experiences years later. It is an enduring and scarily prescient novel about the ravages of plague, the price of power and both the fragility and persistent strength of hope. Moreover, it has become the novel that is the touchstone for generations of horror and speculative fiction loving fiction fans. 

In The End of the World As We Know It, editors Christopher Golden and Brian Keene along with a bevy of powerhouse authors have come to tell stories within the world, reimagining, reinterpreting, and responding to King’s classic. There are no retellings here because there are plenty of fresh nightmares to be spun in the world of Captain Trips. I spoke with some of the brilliant minds behind the anthology and why The Stand still haunts us generations later, what it taught them about scale, hope, human persistence, and what it means to write at the edge of the world.

[GdM] How did the idea for this anthology come about? Was there a conversation, a spark, or just a shared love of The Stand that led you to revisit it through a fresh lineup of voices? And when it came to tone, what kind of balance were you aiming for—between honoring King’s world and building something completely your own?

[Christopher Golden] I’m going to take the second part of that question first. There’s no way that we could ever lay claim to any of this being “completely our own.” What we wished for, and what we got, were stories that would be unique to each contributor but that would live and breathe in the world of The Stand. We’re honoring Stephen King, of course, and his extraordinary novel, but I know I can speak for both myself and Brian when I say that we’re also honoring the love we share for the book, and the kids we were when we each first read it. The Stand is part of the foundation of who I am as a writer and as a human being. That’s not overstating. Receiving the email back from Steve that said “Do it!” was such a gift. Brian and I communicated our passion and excitement to the contributors and they gave us theirs in return, in the form of 34 fantastic stories that are weird and different and yet have all grown from the fertile soil of the original novel. As for the idea…I’d basically given up editing anthologies, and then one day I was thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and I knew I had to tell Brian, and then I was emailing Steve, and then he replied, and suddenly it was real.

[Brian Keene] And those first few minutes after it became real were simultaneously wonderful and daunting and exhilarating and terrifying. Chris and I had previously edited another similar anthology together—The Drive-In: Multiplex, which was to Joe R. Lansdale’s seminal Drive-In trilogy what this book is to The Stand. Now… when you work on something with a friend, be it cowriting a novel or coediting an anthology, it can either be an awesome and rewarding experience or it can just be the worst experience you’ve ever had. In the case of working with Chris, it was awesome. The Drive-In: Multiplex was fun to put together, creatively challenging and rewarding, and well received by readers and critics. So, I was definitely up for doing it again, but when Chris said he was done editing anthologies, I respected that. I’ve edited eight anthologies, previously. Chris has edited four hundred thousand bazillion. I figured that was that… until during one of our almost-daily phone calls he said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?” And I agreed it would. And luckily, so did Steve. (laughs) 

[GdM] People often call The Stand one of King’s masterpieces—and one of horror’s most enduring stories. From your perspective, what makes it a horror novel, and where does it land in the larger landscape of the genre?

[BK] There’s a long tradition of such works within Horror and Dark Fantasy, stretching all the way back to M. P. Shiel’s 1901 novel The Purple Cloud and William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land from 1912. And there are various works that predate those, as well. The Stand rightfully stands alongside all of them. Indeed, I think it towers over everything that came before it, and is the blueprint that all of us who came after have been following, without ever exceeding.

[CG] The thing about horror is that it contains multitudes. Almost any story can be a horror story, depending on what ingredients you add, and the slant you put on it. For me, there are so many ways in which The Stand is horror, beginning with the fact that we see Captain Trips unfolding. Many apocalyptic stories start after the worst is over and then it’s about surviving. We go through it all with these characters. The symptoms of the Superflu are horrific, and the way King digs into the emotional and psychological experiences of characters watching their loved ones, and the whole world, dying around them…that’s horror. And that’s before you even get to the malevolent presence of Flagg, dreams about him, his corrupting presence…and the Holland Tunnel. As for the larger landscape of the genre…it’s one of the signposts on this road, for sure. Its influence will be felt by writers and readers, even those who’ve never read it, for generations to come.

[GdM] What do you think The Stand showed modern horror writers about scale—whether it’s how deep you go with characters, how wide you go with the world, or how much emotional weight you can pack into an apocalypse?

[CG] There’s a truly simple answer to that. Readers still have to care. Epic, sprawling, over one thousand pages…it could have been two thousand pages, and we would have read every page, because King makes us care. In many ways, the larger the apocalypse, the more epic the scale, the more intimate we need to be with the characters. We have to share their experience. If readers don’t care…they won’t care.

[BK] Exactly. Any form of horror works best if the reader is invested in the characters. That’s why a franchise such as Friday the 13th, for example, isn’t necessarily terrifying. Oh, it may have some genuine scares, but it’s not going to stick with you and effect you weeks or months or even years later, because you just don’t care about a bunch of surplus teenagers with minimal backstory. Give the readers people to identify with or be invested in, and the horror becomes much more effective. I think The Stand represents some of Steve’s best character-work, at least for that era of his career. These are characters who I knew as well as my friends and family. Characters who I saw glimpses of myself in (Larry when I was younger, Glen Bateman now). If I am emotionally invested in them, then when the horrific things start happening, it’s far more effective.

Editors Christopher Golden and Brian Keene

[GdM] Why do you think The Stand still hits so hard after all these years? What is it about King’s version of the end of the world that keeps pulling readers and writers back in?

[CG] That intimacy is a big part of it. The characters are so beautifully drawn—the ones we love and the ones that get under our skin. But it’s also such a purely American novel and paints such an interesting 20th century American landscape. But beyond its American-ness, it’s also such an exploration of human behavior. The way characters behave, their hopes and fears and struggles, their courage and their cowardice, are so recognizably human. And, of course, in 2025 when we’ve had our own pandemic and the world is being willfully unraveled by greed, corruption, and idiocy, the feeling that it could all end abruptly (and stupidly) is overwhelming. We can hide in these pages while also processing those fears.

[BK] The most common refrain I heard from people in the early days of the pandemic and the lockdown was “This is just like The Stand”. And I wasn’t immune to that thinking, either. I vividly remember when we were first getting reports of Covid-19 here in America. Chris and I were spending the day at Joe Hill’s house, and all three of us had just gotten done traveling the week before, and we joked that we were Patient Zeros for the horror genre. But on my train ride back to Pennsylvania… seeing less people than normal, and folks starting to mask up, and reading conflicting news reports… all I kept thinking was, “This really is like The Stand. Okay, I’ve prepped for this. I’ve reread that novel once a year every year since it was first published. I’ve got this!” In retrospect, processing what was happening through the lens of the book helped me with the apprehension and anxiety I felt as a father, and as someone who has immunocompromised loved ones. It was a way to deal, you know?

[GdM] Do you think the way we talk about “the end of the world” has changed since 2020? Did that shift shape the stories you gravitated toward—or how you interpreted them as editors?

[CG] All of the stories in the book were contributions from authors we approached because we had a sense they would give us something unique. We wanted that same sense of humanity, but from a wide variety of perspectives. I took for granted that living in the world as it currently stands (pun intended) would influence the writers and their stories. We’ve all been changed now, irrevocably and most of us probably not for the better. But there is always hope, even in the darkest times. We can always dream of Mother Abagail and gather in Boulder with like-minded people who want a better world. And we can write stories to explore our hopes and fears.

[GdM] When readers finish the last story and close the book, what do you hope sticks with them—a feeling, a question, a particular image they can’t shake?

[BK] As a fan of the novel, I hope they have the same reaction to the stories that Steve had. Hopefully they’ll love and enjoy them as much as he did. And I hope that they’ll discover some new favorite authors to read more by. One thing we made sure of was that all of the genre’s various forms were represented. Whether your preferred horror is mainstream, quiet, weird, splatterpunk, dark fantasy, thriller, supernatural, surreal, or even comedic, its represented in the anthology. 

[CG] My hope is that readers have been unsettled, amused, saddened, horrified, and made to think about the world and the nature of human beings. But I also hope that they feel Brian and I, and each of the contributors, have added something worthwhile to the world of the novel and to readers’ conversations and feelings about it. Finally, I hope everyone who reads this book is inspired to go and read The Stand all over again.

[GdM] Now we will get an opportunity to chat with some of the contributing authors of the anthology. I asked each author the same three questions so that we can compare how The Stand affects each of us differently and how those differences are translated into storytelling.

[GdM] Do you remember how you felt the first time you read “The Stand”? Has that feeling stayed with you, and did it shape how you approached your own story for this anthology?

[Chuck Wendig] I do remember it! I was in high school and I was reading it alongside some friends and I remember not only the sense of communal joy and power (and horror, obviously) in that, but I also clearly remember us interfacing whenever we were getting to parts that were like, whoa what the fuck. Best example of that: Larry and Rita escaping NYC through the nightmarish Lincoln Tunnel.

[Premee Mohamed] Yes! I read it in my final year of high school (1997), and I remember that because I did a tour of the university I was planning to attend and I picked the book up at lunchtime at their bookstore (I was attracted to the bright orange and black cover, and  was like “I already like Stephen King and this seems like a ton of book for the money”). I remember being instantly hooked. He so instantly threw me into the world of “Something is wrong, very very wrong.” He had built such a vast and complicated cast of characters, and yet wove them so smoothly into the overarching plots and subplots that every individual was utterly memorable. When I re-read ‘The Stand’ to refresh my memory for my own story, I found myself feeling profoundly reconnected with all these people, as if I had gone into a room I expected to be empty and instead found dozens of friends there. It absolutely shaped how I approached my own story — I didn’t want the supernatural aspects to overshadow the characters, because the main thing you always get from a King story of any length is “These are people.“

[Tim Lebbon] I think I first read The Stand when I was about 15, and it instantly became my favourite novel. It still is now. That meant that I felt a huge responsibility when I wrote my story ‘Grace’ … but it also gave me the opportunity to answer the question I asked myself 40 years ago on that first reading: ‘What happens to astronauts in space when Captain Trips hits?’

[David J. Schow] I was stuck in Chicago during the blizzard of 1978. I cadged a review copy out of Doubleday and read it three times in a row―literally going back to page one after the final page. THE STAND was a good place into which to vanish for awhile.

Original version only. (Steve amended a bunch of it, even for the first paperback.)

[Alex Segura] I do—I read The Stand around the time my son was born. And as any parent can tell you, having a newborn is a moment of chaos and uncertainty and fear—so reading The Stand was almost soothing, ha! I still think about those opening scenes, and how King ratcheted up the tension so masterfully. It still sticks with me today,

[Meg Gardiner] I was immersed, transported, terrified, exultant, and riveted from start to finish. From my early teens I craved books that would sweep me away for entire days, weekends, weeks. The Stand swallowed me whole. It grabbed me by the heart and throat. It has never let go. In writing my story, what I wanted to do most was what the novel does: embrace the characters’ humanity. That’s why The Stand stays with me.

[Bev Vincent] I read the abridged version of The Stand in about 1980 and it was definitely one of the books that made me want to read more of King’s work. It was an immersive experience and I remember being totally swept away by the story and becoming deeply fond of the characters. When Stu breaks his leg and gets left behind, I was devastated because of King’s cunning pseduo-foreshadowing. I’ve re-read the book numerous times, including once before writing “Lockdown,” and it is still as compelling and involving as the first time through. I am so familiar with the story that I was easily able to put myself in that world and carve out a little corner of it for myself to explore.

[GdM] Writing in the shadow of something as massive as The Stand has to be a balancing act. How did you navigate the tension between reverence and reinvention, while still making sure your own voice came through loud and clear?

[Chuck Wendig] I think, though it sounds counterintuitive, the best thing writers can do—and not just in a situation like this, but in general—is to turn their brains off. Obviously I don’t mean to turn off the part that’s devoted to the story, ahem, I just mean, you gotta know when to block out the stuff that isn’t really designed to write the story. And I think worrying too much about reverence and reinvention and being a part of something so so hug and so so important can really be a paralyzing thing. There is a tension there! And I don’t know that such tensions serves the beam, so to speak.

It’s mostly after you’ve written it that you think, okay, is this the story it needs to be? It has to cast its own shadow and not be lost. But it also has to be somewhat true to the thing that cast the first shadow, you know?

[Premee Mohamed] That was really hard for me. I haven’t written much in someone else’s world (so actually I was very glad that our editors said we could write way outside the novel provided that we didn’t actually break canon) so I spent a long time fretting about how close to adhere to the timeline and events of the novel, or how far to stray, and then how much I could make up and whether it ‘fit,’ or whether it was totally unreasonable. I think in this case, being a longtime King fan helped — he’s not afraid of dropping obscurities and explaining them later, or leaving them entirely unexplained, because that’s one of the fun things about his particular brand of horror. You just don’t know what’s happening sometimes and you have to act despite that, if you want to survive the story. So I ran with that, and tried to use setting and community to add my own voice. I was trying to ask the most basic King question, which is, “If you didn’t believe this was supernatural, but you still had to solve the problem, what would you do?” And the answer is, “I’d get my friends, hop on my quad, and go rescue the kidnapped child.”

[Tim Lebbon] I just wrote the best story I could, and soon realised that it was actually a story that served as a sort of prequel to the main action in the book. Honestly that didn’t really worry me when I was actually working on it … but once I’d delivered it I suddenly felt the pressure! Luckily Chris and Brian liked the story, and I’m pleased to say Stephen King did too.

[David J. Schow] Easily—I always try to write the one story nobody else would think of.

[Alex Segura] It was daunting at first, but I tried to approach it the same way I would writing in the Star Wars or Marvel or DC universes—you find a little space where you can use your voice and create something additive and unique. I knew I wanted to tell a harrowing story about parenting and about dealing with the aftershocks of a seismic, worldwide event—which unfortunately seems less impossible today than when the book came out. But my hope was to create something that complemented the work and felt special on its own.

[Meg Gardiner] Being asked to contribute to the anthology was a privilege, and imposed a responsibility. I wanted to honor the novel. I was being admitted to its imaginative world. I wanted to create characters that were wholly mine, and put them to the test within The Stand’s inimitable setting.

[Bev Vincent] Someone who has read the anthology told me that they thought I had captured King’s style in “Lockdown,” but that was never my intention and I was surprised to hear that. My main goal was to be true to the chronology of the story, which is why one of the first things I did was reread the novel and create a day-by-day timeline of events to make sure I wasn’t stepping out of continuity. I knew the story I wanted to tell, inspired by the various reactions to pandemic lockdown we’d seen just a short while earlier. Would King have told the same story differently? More than likely. I didn’t try to emulate him–that would have been too hard!

[GdM] When we tell stories about the end of the world, are we also asking whether anything is worth saving? How important is it to leave space for hope—and in your story for this anthology, did you choose to offer that space, or close the door on it?

[Chuck Wendig] Hope is complicated, but we need the space for it, for sure. And my story aims to leave room for it—while also being clear that hope is complicated. It’s not a Free Parking card in Monopoly, you can’t just get it and zip past Go and collect your check. Hope is a thing with teeth, and it can bite you if you give too much to it. I aim to find that balance—that place where hope is both a light in the tunnel, but a place where hope might just be a train barreling toward you in the dark. Horror lives in that uncertainty, I think.

[Premee Mohamed] I guess it depends on the story and how we’re defining ‘the end of the world’! If we’re saying, as in ‘The Stand,’ that a lot of people died but the essential infrastructure was still available to re-start everything exactly the way it was for the survivors, I think hope is inherently there: you have all the blueprints, you can rebuild as fast as your trauma allows. In a lot of other ‘end of the world’ narratives, that’s missing — the knowledge is gone, or the infrastructure is gone, or the physical world itself is irreparably changed (radiation, desertification, solar flares, asteroid strike, whatever) and then that becomes something you have to contend with. Then the hope is that you can save the absolute bare minimum, which is humanity. I think there’s a lot to be said for asking what we’re hoping for, at the end of the world. Is it merely survival? Is it erasure of the past? An advancement of civilization, a carbon-copy of what came before, something better, something different, new rules, new governance, etc? In my story, I left the door (I think) a little less open than the end of ‘The Stand,’ but not shut all the way. Hope lives in the uncertainty of knowing whether the human race is really in its twilight or not — the characters in the story have just had their particular hopes dashed, but even they have to admit it’s a big world and there’s room for surprises.

[Tim Lebbon] I’m still an optimist at heart, despite the troubled world we live in. So yes, there’s absolutely a strong vein of hope running through my story, as there is in the novel.

[David J. Schow] No spoilers! No guarantees! As a species, we don’t control as much as we like to believe we do. Even in our bleakest scenarios, we either tilt against chaos or embrace it. Usually a survival mindset prevails. Self-interest drives humanity—enlightened self-interest can be revelatory.

[Alex Segura] I don’t want to spoil the ending, but there’s definitely a moment where the reader will hopefully think “wow, he could have gone the other way with this”—meaning either positive or really, really grimdark. I hope the end result provides readers with a powerful ending.

[Meg Gardiner] The novel features indestructible hope, in the direst of circumstances. I didn’t want to write something that lacked it. There’s space. I let it open. Maybe just a crack. I do write suspense, after all.

[Bev Vincent] I think “Lockdown” is completely about people deciding that a small corner of the world was worth preserving as much and for as long as possible. The characters in it are people who know how to survive a long time without access to the larger world. It’s almost like they’ve been training for this all their lives! So, they have hope, but it’s a selfish, survivalist hope. As for the rest of the world? They don’t really have the luxury of worrying about that too much. They do hope things will return to normal eventually because they will eventually not be able to sustain themselves.

This interview was first published in Grimdark Magazine Issue #43

Read The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand Ed. by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene 

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REVIEW: Conan the Barbarian #22

Conan, his band of Bamula warriors, and Princess Livia have been drugged and imprisoned in the Stygian border town of Keshatta by the ruthless enchantress Athyr-Bast. She and other members of a sorcerous clique known as the Black Ring pit captives against each other in gladiatorial combat as a means of entertaining the unwashed masses while simultaneously jockeying for position and prestige within the Ring. Given no opportunity to prepare, Conan immediately finds himself thrust into the arena with the reigning champion, a giant brute named Krum-Va the Carver. Despite the formidable odds, Conan emerges alive but not unscathed. Further victories under the nom de guerre Amra the Annihilator earn Conan special treatment among the gladiators, and Athyr-Bast basks in her pet warrior’s triumphs. However, thoughts of liberating himself and his comrades are never far from Conan’s mind.

Conan the Barbarian issue #22, “Diamond in the Dirt,” borrows many recognizable elements from Spartacus and every other gladiator movie and TV show you’ve ever seen. Grossly mismatched opponents, triumphant underdogs, friends pitted against friends, slaves elevated to celebrity, privileged women dallying with their gladiators, etc. The tropes and story beats may be familiar, but they remain entertaining. While pit fighter was never a vocation undertaken by the barbarian in the original Robert E. Howard stories, it’s exciting to see the exploits of Conan the Gladiator in a more expanded capacity than the ruthlessly edited taste viewers were shown in the 1982 Conan the Barbarian film.

Fernando Dagnino’s artwork continues to appeal. Gladiatorial combat appears frequently throughout the issue, and Dagnino delivers melee depictions that feel not only dynamic and forceful, but rhythmically paced as well. Outside of the arena, Dagnino proves himself adept with the quieter moments. Athyr-Bast remains an alluring and well-dressed femme fatale, and women’s faces and costuming haven’t always been shown this much attention and care under previous Conan the Barbarian artists.

The Jeffrey Shanks essay accompanying Conan the Barbarian #22 explores the ancient Egyptian-themed land of Stygia, an isolationist land dominated by sorcery and snake cults. In addition to the current “Nest of Serpents” story arc, Stygia is set to figure heavily in the upcoming “Scourge of the Serpent” event miniseries, and the essay offers newcomers some welcome grounding in one of the Hyborian Age’s most evocative and mysterious locales.

While this reader hopes the much-teased antagonist Thoth-Amon will take a more prominent role in the next issue, Conan the Barbarian issue #22 is a fun and fast-paced gladiator montage.

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REVIEW: Cathedral of the Drowned by Nathan Ballingrud

Crypt of the Moon Spider, the first book in the Lunar Gothic Trilogy, was one of my favorite books of 2024. Cathedral of the Drowned has even more entrancing writing, delightfully disturbed characters, eerie horror, and a whole lot more legs, eggs, and mandibles. If you can stomach it, this sequel will be one of your most memorable reads of 2025. 

Veronica viciously reaped her revenge after surviving the nightmarish “treatments” at Dr. Barrington Cull’s lunar psychiatric facility in the first book. Now, Veronica is the reincarnation of the ancient Moonspiders. While not a POV character in this book, her presence hangs over the story. The moon itself is one of her many eyes as she hatches eggs and hunts Cull.

The majority of the book follows Charlie. The gentle half of his brain is now housed in a satellite that Cull launched into space to explore other planets, leaving Grub, his enraged half, somewhere in the Barrowfield facility. After crashing onto a moon of Jupiter, drowned priests take Charlie into a sunken cathedral spaceship sent long ago by Catholic missionaries (such a cool idea) for an audience with the Bishop, a hivemind centipede. Will Charlie give in to what the Bishop’s power offers? Without Grub, he’s fragile. Without Cull, directionless. Without Maggie, unloved. Perhaps he needs a carapace for such an exposed mind. And what to do about the murderous creature in the bell tower? 

On earth, Goodnight Maggie’s gang verges on destruction. With the Sicilian mafia killing her men, threatening moonsilk supply lines, and sowing mutiny, she already has enough problems when a mutilated Dr. Cull shows up. On top of that, a ghostly satellite appears some nights in her room, awakening her love for Charlie through the moon silk. Can she dominate her gang, the Sicilians, Cull, lurking Alabaster Scholars, Veronica’s Barrowfield horrors, and her own heart? For Maggie, love both threatens and soothes, and her desire may be a more dangerous enemy than those with guns and fangs.

I didn’t expect to see myself in a lobotomized brain wrapped in spider silk and encased in a tiny satellite or sympathize with a mafia boss making out with a psychic centipede and her empowering surrender to his undulating legs. But here we are. As a less experienced horror reader, I’m learning this is the disquieting beauty of the genre. A gifted writer like Ballingrud can take something I have experienced, like trauma causing a schism within ourselves, and bring the idea to life (or death) in characters. 

After the first book, I did expect to be transfixed by the prose in Cathedral of the Drowned. Months later, I’m still drawn back to certain lines. 

A standout quality is the vivid precision with imagery, description, and choice of detail. It’s not just that the imagery of the sunken space cathedral is beautiful. Or that the descriptions of Charlie’s psychology are poignant and strange. It’s that he uses the perfect details: the way the sea surges, a carapace glistening in torchlight, how time distorts in a broken mind. Two descriptions that stuck with me were tongues like “questing slugs”, and people as “dreaming meat”. If you’re uncomfortable with spiders, centipedes, or body horror, the vivid writing may twist the knife too far, and I’d recommend picking up another book. For me, though, it was a can’t-look-away marvel. 

Imagery plays into another strength: the book’s pacing. Despite the short length of Cathedral of the Drowned, the book isn’t afraid to use imagery to slow to a languid, dreamy pace, or stretch a scene to build suspense, then whiplash into quick action. One scene had me holding my breath like a kid driving through a tunnel until their lungs burn. Before I could exhale someone was pasted to a wall as a tortured incubator for spider eggs. 

My favorite aspect of the writing is tone. In the first book, Veronica’s POV was eerie, dreamy, and full of metaphors to unmoor herself from depression and emotional claustrophobia. In Cathedral of the Drowned, the tone of Charlie’s chapters are just as captivating. He ranges from resigned, curious, horrified, yearning, desperate, and meek, yet the tone maintains a disturbing detachment that reads brilliantly. Since much of the disorienting horror is abstract and centers in Charlie’s mind, analogies and similes cleverly ground the reader, contrasting how they were used with Veronica.

I was excited for the writing in Grub’s chapters. What does the mind of Charlie’s rage sound like when everything gentle has literally been ripped away? Part of the difficulty of being brilliant is that even something great can feel disappointing. The language didn’t feel much different than Charlie’s. I’m curious if other people were bigger fans of those chapters and I just had particular expectations. 

In such a diamond of a book, there was only a small crack or two. One was the Charlie/Grub reunion arc. To lovingly accept the ugliest parts of ourselves is beautiful. If that means uniting with an interdimensional centipede, so be it. I just felt like the emotional groundwork wasn’t there to pull at my heartstrings. Maybe mine were out of tune for these scenes, and others connected to it. I was struck by their insight into the relationship between rage and fear, though. 

Going into the final book of the trilogy, my main interests are the roles of power, control, and self-protection among the three main characters. Veronica commands the Alabaster Scholars. The Bishop controls the drowned priests. Goodnight Maggie—the only non-psychic leader—keeps power over her gang with cunning, violence, and her form of love. Great storytelling, overall, and hopefully this setup is built upon. 

Cathedral of the Drowned has set up an epic and truly horrifying arachnid vs. arthropod cosmic showdown. Grab your tinfoil hat and bug spray, because I think the final book will be fantastic. 

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INTERVIEW: Sara Omer author of The Gryphon King

Sara Omer is a Pushcart Prize-nominated short story writer. She’s been a technical editor for medical and engineering publications and is now pursuing teaching. You can find her (sometimes unsettling) poetry and prose in places like The Dark, PodCastle, Small Wonders, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere.

[GdM] Hi Sara, thanks for chatting. Your debut dark epic fantasy, The Gryphon King, Book 1 of the Chaos Constellation trilogy (a series title so cool it could also double as a prog rock band) was released on July 8 from Titan Books. Can you give us a rundown of what it’s about and who it will appeal to?

[SO] The Gryphon King is about a conquering warlord who sees the souls of the dying and his enemy, a pegasus-riding princess knight from a powerful empire. She wants nothing more than to get revenge against him, but they’re forced to be allies against a slew of magical beasts and scheming courtiers, and their backs are turned as ancient power reawaken. They’re also nursing tender feelings for the same person. If you like lots of battles, can stomach gore, don’t balk at large casts of characters, and enjoy your grimdark tasting as sweet as baklava and garnished with a bit of romance, this would be the blood-soaked book for you.

[GdM] This is a novel inspired by both the history and mythology of Southwest Asia. Although you’re not the first to take such inspiration in recent years, it still feels a very fresh fantasy landscape, particular your focus on the Turkic peoples and your take on the Ottoman harems (the sultan’s royal family, including his concubines and their children). Talk us through why you chose these myths and history to play with and what areas you found fascinating to weave into the story.

[SO] I haven’t seen a lot of SWANA stories (at least by SWANA authors) inspired by the Ottoman Empire—which is a shame because it’s a special interest of mine. The Ottoman courts were so interesting in their organization and personal brand of opulence and ways of dealing with succession. Particularly the workings of the harem, where concubines, female servants, and princesses were educated for political marriages, and princes, posing threats to succession, were kept in “golden cages.” The viziers, eunuch servants, and queen mother all playing important political roles was a major inspiration for the workings of the Dumakran court, as were many of the stories surrounding Suleiman the Magnificent (like what exactly happened to his heart when he died—look that up because the story is very good and quite romantic!).

Steppe people are portrayed a lot of different ways in fantasy. Often they’re the heavily stereotyped barbarians, which is unfortunate for many reasons. The traditional religions of that area are so beautiful, and the culture is so rich, and they were so innovating and cutting-edge, especially in warfare. So borrowing a bit from the Secret History of the Mongols, animism, and eagle-wielding central Asian Turkic tribes, the Utasoo people were born.

So there’s a bit of pre-Islamic mythos because I’m inspired by those ancient Turkic stories and ancient Sumerian and Mesopotamian stories particularly when it comes to the Dumakran religion—Ereshkigal and Inanna heavily inspired the Nuna and Paga in different ways, and in Pre-Abrahamic myth in the region there were avenging winged goddesses that inspired the Harpy daughters of the Goddess.

[GdM] There are some really fun and simultaneously terrifying monsters in here: the gryphons; the standout murder horses, or pegasuses to give them their proper name (is that their plural? I went down a black hole on this online and sort of gave up, it was intense); and others that are best not to reveal. What’s with the love for monsters, and these monsters in particular?

[SO] Everyone has strong feelings about pegasi versus pegasuses. I’ve seen people leave lovely, gushing reviews and still be unable to make themselves type “pegasuses.” I think it depends on if the word has a Greek or Latin origin, but I’ve heard different things. In Greek myth there’s just the one Pegasus, so I think that complicates things a bit. I thought it would be a more familiar word than the Turkic “tulpar/tulpars.”

All of that aside—I love animals. It might be strange to say, at the rate they’re dying in this book. Ever since I was little I loved nature documentaries. My favourite animal is an orca, which will eat mostly anything (and inspired one of the monsters quite heavily).

I love stories where people form unique and unlikely bonds with magical creatures, but I also think stories where the monsters act like animals and can still make more realistic bonds with humans are interesting. I’d love to hear my cat’s voice in my head and our every interaction be peaches and rainbows, but usually he’s dunking my socks in his water dish, and we still love each other fine, miscommunication and all.

I learned to ride horses when I was very young (and they can be as mean and nearly as man-eating as the ones in the book). Going off the tulpar myth, where godlike winged horses mate with steppe horses, I got to thinking a lot about magical ecosystems, and with the giant roc in Southwest Asian myth, it seemed *magically* possible it could be a common ancestor of both giant flying horses and giant flying lions. I hope readers also spend too much time thinking of how evolution happened in this world.

I wanted to particularly highlight some of my favourite magical beasts that often don’t get their time in the spotlight like dragons. I love dragons too, but look at all the monsters you can ride or make havoc with! All of the monsters exist in SWANA myth or the Mediterranean, so picture me doing my research on what beasts I could include in the region, lighting up with excitement at each new monster.

I could talk about magical animals all day.

[GdM] I’m not stopping you! Alongside the remarkable worldbuilding and monsters and action there’s some classic Machiavellian court politics shenanigans, helped by a lengthy list of characters (44, according to the helpful list at the start of the book). You’ve said you’re inspired by G R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and this has that complex family allegiance/betrayal vibe to it. Was it hard to balance the monster/action stuff with the political shenanigans?

[SO] I think it would be impossible to convey the scope of an imperial harem without having quite a few named characters in the Dumakran court. That sense of claustrophobia is something that defines Nohra’s relationship to her large family. And then when you combine two worlds like Bataar’s and Nohra’s and there’s all those characters interacting, there’s so many warring ideologies and desires that become political machinations.

The political backstabbing can be as exciting as the actual backstabbing, and it shows characters fighting on different ground (some are much better armed with a blade, like Nohra, and that can be fun too).

I’ve also said that the politics happen naturally after the fighting, so in that lull after sickle-staffs and sabers have been swung, there’s time for a bit of scheming and deal-making and deal breaking until the next monster attacks.

[GdM] Your main male protagonist, Bataar, is an intriguingly morally grey character; at once a conqueror who wishes to bring peace and prosperity to his conquered kingdoms but also not afraid to shed a lot of blood to get there. Were you influenced by any previous characters, real or otherwise, when writing him? And was it hard to make him likeable enough to empathise with but morally grey enough to be interesting?

[SO] He has some of Ghengis Khan’s flair for making himself a legend and also uses storytelling as a way of achieving and maintaining power through the rumours he spreads. Bataar also has some of Suleiman the Magnificent in him as well—a talent with words (though not poetry) and a real romantic love for his wife. Nohra would like to think Bataar has some Attila—like a weakness for women—but Bataar is too demisexual for that.

I’ve compared him to Ned Stark: a ruthless family man, and recently someone asked if there were Griffith and Guts (Berserk)-coded characters in TGK and I completely blanked, but I do think Bataar has a bit of Griffith in him. Early Golden Age arc deluding himself he’s doing it all for a higher purpose.

I put a lot of myself in Bataar too—we even have the same anxious tic. It was a fine line to make him likable, and I don’t think he works for everyone. Sometimes he’s cruel because a warlord would be to keep power, but he has a good tragic backstory with the Dumakran Empire exploiting the red steppe, and he’s very tender with Qaira and his children, and he deeply regrets the bad things.

[GdM] There’s a clear love of good food in this book, including one outrageously outlandish palace meal that is best read on a full stomach (or perhaps not if you want to torture yourself). Talk us through your favourite meal—however many courses you want (I may regret this).

[SO] I ate hummus for lunch every day in high school. I’m a big fan of dips, so all of the dips and taboullah to start, and some garlic nan and Turkish pizza.

I’ve been a vegetarian for 8 years, and I can say that the best use of a meat substitute is an Impossible kebab, dusted liberally with sumac and drowning in tzatziki.

Persian saffron rice is my favourite because it tastes so buttery and luscious, or sticky rice and some kimchi jjigae with tofu… or creamy mushroom ramen.

Water, Thai tea, iced green tea, lemonade, and mango smoothies to drink (I think ayran tastes too salty).

Pasta—maybe with a lemony garlic sauce, and then dessert.

Pistachio stracciatella ice cream, a fluffy and fruity cake with plenty of whipped cream icing, baklava, and large bowls of very dark cherries.

Thank you.

[GdM] Wow, that was a real thing…

There’s a fluid sense of sexuality in this book: a lot of bi rep, sapphic slow burn, potential poly relationships. What do you think this says about the world and its characters… and why the extreme slow burn? 

[SO] This world may have 3 (so far) kinds of horses that would eat you, but it doesn’t have homophobia. The ancient history of the Near East is really interesting in that regard, starting with stories like Enkidu and Gilgamesh predating Achilles and Patrocles, and moving on into queer poetry that can get quite raunchy and then into the orientalists portrayals of same-sex relationships that got quite fetishistic before colonialism rewrote all that history. The nature of the sorts of open relationships in historical imperial harems lends quite easily to speculation.

Slow-burn secondary romances in fantasy are my favourite. All of the buildup and tension just simmering in the background threatening to boil over is so fun. And the romance of The Gryphon King is clearly quite messy, so its road ahead will be fraught. I enjoy that particular kind of torture.

[GdM] Moving on to Sara Omer herself, what’s been your professional background leading up to your debut, and how much of it was directly useful in writing it?

[SO] I’ve interned at a modern art magazine and a children’s book publisher, and I’ve worked editing clinical and basic science medical journals and an engineering magazine. Reviewing clinical images of illnesses definitely impacted the ghoulish disease outbreak in The Gryphon King. I’ve done a bit of my own research in various journals for some of the injuries in the series and have discovered the limits of my own squeamishness.

[GdM] The build-up to publishing your debut in the traditional publishing space is obviously an exciting time but also can be quite a stressful one, too, the word “stressful” doing a lot of heavy lifting there. How have you found it, both the good and the bad? 

[SO] The secret is to always be stressed. But it’s been very lovely seeing readers connect with the story, and an honour in general seeing people I don’t know reading the book, this feral story that once was only in my head.

Obviously it’s also stressful for the same reasons, or worse, like when there’s no one reviewing right this second and I’m struck by that brief, silly hopelessness and think I will have to go viral on TikTok to be perceived.

[GdM] I’m thinking of getting stickers with “the secret is to always be stressed” on them now.

How did you spend book launch day?

[SO] I spent my launch day running around London looking for free Wi-Fi spots, using the tube for the first time (getting lost in underground stations), to spend some lovely time at the Titan Headquarters and end the night with a super relaxed launch talk with Super Relaxed Fantasy Club. They really were super relaxed—even if I wasn’t!

[GdM] Finally, what can you tell us about the rest of the ‘Chaos Constellation’ trilogy? And do you have any other future books in the works?

[SO] The future of the Chaos Constellation: There will be at least one wedding! A glimpse into a mysterious world of djinn! More monster entries for the infernal bestiary (including one of my Arthurian favourites)!

I have a few other books on hold to polish up when I get a chance, but I’m excited to start on a few new ideas that have been brewing.

Read The Gryphon King by Sara Omer

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REVIEW: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio

A melodramatic, poetic, and deeply interesting framed narrative, Christopher Ruocchio’s Empire of Silence is an exciting debut that may have finally made me fall in love with sci-fi as a genre. Hadrian Marlowe, a man of great heroism and greater atrocity, tells his story and how he became a figure known across the galaxies.

“Atrocity is writ by quiet men in council chambers over crystal glasses of cool water. Strange little men with ashes in their hearts. Sans passion, sans hope… sans everything. Everything but fear.”

Before getting into this review, I have to say, Ruocchio can fucking write. Sci-fi, despite my love for fantasy, has generally never really done it for me. There’s been a few entries into fantasy’s sister genre that I’ve fallen in love with (Hyperion, Book of the New Sun) but generally speaking, I’m all in when it’s swords & horses and all out when it’s lasers & spaceships.

Empire of Silence may have changed that for me.

The narrator of Empire of Silence, Hadrian Marlowe, is superbly written. This is a framed narrative a la Name of the Wind or Blood Song, and while we don’t have any interludes set in the “present”, Hadrian does have some winks, foreshadowing, and fourth wall breaks as he acknowledges the way this story is being told.

While Hadrian is a man who has set the sky aflame and snuffed out billions of souls, Empire of Silence shows us his beginning. He’s a lord who never quite fits in with his privileged peers and family. His teachers lovingly berate him for being melodramatic, his father and brother hate him because they don’t understand him. Regardless of who he’s with, Hadrian is unable to stop his heart from bleeding, and it creates a nuanced main character who has to weigh his position against his instincts.

I absolutely adore both Hadrian and ultimately, Ruocchio’s writing. Empire of Silence burns white-hot sometimes, showing the burning potential that Sun Eater has. My favorite chapter in this tale is just a bit over a page in length, but every word of it set my mind alight and stirred my soul.

The world-building is as strong as the writing. We see only a few planets, but you can truly feel the scope of the setting that Ruocchio has built. The people who populate the planets are unique from each other, but also, still human. They all crave bloodsport, all crave a better life. Behind the scenes of Empire of Silence we do get some extremely cool foreshadowing about an elder race, as well as humanity’s designated eternal enemy: the Cielcin. A breed of ghostly white, elongated humanoids that the church has marked as demons and the armies fight across the galaxy.

“The world’s soft the way the ocean is. Ask any sailor what I mean. But even when it is at its most violent, Hadrian . . . focus on the beauty of it. The ugliness of the world will come at you from all sides. There’s no avoiding it. All the schooling in the universe won’t stop that.”

While I love the writing, the main character, and the world-building in Empire of Silence, I did have a few problems. The pacing in it is weird to describe: it’s a slow book with short, snappy chapters. It dwells on places for a bit too long sometimes, especially the first twenty-five percent, which is a bit of a rocky start. The dialogue in Empire of Silence is mostly good, but only really shines in a few moments between Hadrian and Valka. Some of the side characters are one-note, instead of feeling like fully fleshed out, real people. Finally, I’ve always disliked sci-fi’s hand waving of “we have shields that stop bullets but not swords.” That’s strictly a personal, petty nitpick, but it’s one I need to call out.

I’ll be honest, I actually picked up Empire of Silence a long time ago and ended up DNFing it. I am so glad I came back, especially given the last two hundred pages or so of the book. The problems I highlighted are not only minor—and only worth highlighting when you compare them to the highs that Ruocchio offers—they all feel like classic debut snags, and as Ruocchio grew more confident, his skills increased. Based on everything I’ve heard, I’m expecting the remaining books to blow me away, and regardless, Empire of Silence is a great book.

If you’re looking for sci-fi’s version of The Name of the Wind—or just a great book in general—pick up Empire of Silence. It’s one of the more exciting debuts I’ve read and Ruocchio has the potential and skill to write an all time classic series.

Read Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio

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INTERVIEW: author Essa Hansen

Essa Hansen grew up in the beautiful wildernesses of California, from the coastal foothills to the Sierra Nevada mountains, and then the Canadian Rocky Mountains, before settling back at the California coast. She has ranched bison and sheep, trained horses, practiced Japanese swordsmanship, and is a licensed falconer. By day she works as Nia Hansen for Skywalker Sound as a sound designer on science fiction and fantasy films for clients such as Marvel, Pixar, and Disney Animation. We were very excited to be able to catch up with her and chat about her new novella Casthen Gain, the world of The Graven, and what she’s getting up to next. 

[GdM] Hi Essa, thanks for chatting. Your new novella Casthen Gain, a prequel to your sci-fi trilogy The Graven, comes out on 28 July from Grimdark Magazine, the very people interviewing you now, in a pleasingly circular development. Can you give us a quick rundown of what it’s about and whether readers unfamiliar with the unfathomable genius of The Graven can still pick this up?

[EH] Thank you for inviting me to chat! It’s been great fun revisiting the bubble multiverse of The Graven trilogy. Although Casthen Gain contains cameos and hidden gems for readers of the trilogy, grasping them isn’t necessary to enjoy this standalone story.

Casthen Gain straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy as it follows Sentace Ketch, a multiversal chef thrown into a battle royale hunt for a mysterious energy on an overgrown and dangerous planet in the vein of Scavengers Reign. The arsonist revolutionary he’s been chasing could be his salvation or a death wish, and complicates the game in ways he wasn’t expecting. Add an adorable fluffy alien companion and a squid-thing in a skull jar and you’ve got a weird little found family that I hope readers fall in love with as much as they did the trilogy’s found families.

[GdM] What made you want to jump back into the world of The Graven, and why this prequel story in particular? Was there a particular reason you wanted to explore everyone’s favourite morally grey, ruthless, mulitverse organisation The Casthen? 

[EH] For a long time I’ve been wanting to write a story about a chef character traveling through dangerous lands, and also wanting to answer some of the questions that The Graven didn’t get around to. Over time, those two concepts merged. In the bubble multiverse, physical laws are different within each “bubble” area of space, meaning materials change in various ways as they pass through bubble borders: the perfect situation for imaginative cuisine, literally transforming ingredients and cooking them using physics translations.

The Casthen organization has been around for ages, so it was a logical anchor point for a prequel story. (I wanted to cameo everyone’s favourite morally grey, ruthless badboy Threi during his younger decades with the Casthen, but the timeline proved too finicky.) I intended this novella to highlight some of the same themes as The Graven, ones that naturally crop up around the Casthen organization: questions of autonomy, moral dilemmas from different perspectives, win/lose choices around morality and ethics, corrupt systems and the capacity for goodness to exist despite them, and whether one can use the enemy’s resources for a cause that’s just. Besides all that, the Casthen is where the discards of the world end up (and are exploited), and Sentace is just that.

[GdM] Battle royale is a very particular genre with a set of well-known grim tropes. What made you want to give it a go—and were you influenced by any previous battle royale stories?

[EH] A novella length story wasn’t going to give me time to properly lay out a battle royale plot with the complexity or ensemble cast of stories like the 2000 cult classic Battle Royale, or Alice in Borderland, or the more recent Squid Games. At least, not unless I made the battle royale the entire story. In Casthen Gain, it’s more of a backdrop—one that perfectly fits the Casthen’s way of operating. It hits the right themes for this story: survival through dangerous environments alongside an exploration of grey morality and relationship dynamics under high tension. My favourite part of the genre is the inherent unpredictability of individuals pushed to the brink of stress and exhaustion. A wild creativity becomes possible, with characters surprising themselves and the audience with their choices. In Casthen Gain, I started with a protagonist at a pivot point in his life where he’s ready to become someone new but isn’t quite sure who that is…and the stressors of this survival genre were the perfect place to put his becoming to the test.

[GdM] You’ve done something very interesting with this story, which is that you’ve kept a lot of the grimdark brutality of battle royale but added in what you could call a few cosy elements, including extended scenes of bubble universe cooking [which will make glorious sense when you read it, reader]. I call this cozy grimdark… where did the cooking element come from?

[EH] I seem to fall into this rhythm with every story I write: periods of high tension, stakes, action, and hurt, followed by the quiet, slow, intimate moments of comfort and healing. Then back again, in juxtapositions of brutal and beautiful. I enjoy reading this rhythm as well.

Across cultures, cooking is one of the quintessential ways to show care, to nourish, to bring together, to repair. In The Graven, I wrote a character—Ksiñe, the gastronomist and medic of the crew—who communicates primarily through food, and here too I wanted to explore food as a language, a syntax of peace-offering, of care, strengthening, and acknowledgment. Alongside that, battle royale is a survival genre, and survival requires nourishment. You can’t expect to be efficient in combat or mental clarity or navigating long distances if your whole system isn’t fuelled. I wanted to write a protagonist who understands this. I feel like I rarely see it highlighted in the SF/fantasy genre.

[GdM] This is a very food-based story, so inevitably I’m going to now ask you to provide your favourite/dream three-course meal.

[EH] This may sound like I’m evading the question, but I’m more of a mood-based consumer (with media too!) than one with firm favourites, so genuinely I think the dream meal for me would be to leave it up to the chef to surprise me, but this chef can perceive or intuit exactly what I need in that moment. This is how Sentace cooks for his clientele, different species and cultures from all across the multiverse.

Author Essa Hansen

[GdM] It’s been a couple of years since The Graven trilogy concluded. Fans of The Graven tend to eulogise it and call it one of the best modern-day sci-fi series. Looking back, how do you feel about that series, good and bad, in terms of how you think of it, how others think of it, and how it’s affected your life?

[EH] It’s strange looking back on work that’s three…five…seven years old. I’ve grown immensely through those books and since them, so reading old work can be quite cringe! Mostly I remember being extremely rushed at every stage of the trilogy, like setting track out in front of a speeding train, writing during the leftover hours of the day around a full time job and life’s stressors. The first book debuted in 2020 when the beginning of the pandemic shut the industry down, bookstores were closed, books were abandoned by their teams, and many people—myself included—were locked down alone for months, completely burnt out.

Despite the rough start and middle and end of the process, I’m very proud of my effort, of finishing, and of surviving it in every sense of that word. I stand by the ideas of the series and what I was attempting to convey, and my fans who really “got” the story are one of the best things about the whole experience for me. They kept me going during the days when it felt impossible to finish.

[GdM] Moving on to your life outside writing, you have what I think it’s fair to say is a pretty cool-sounding job: sound designer for Skywalker Sound for clients such as Marvel, Pixar, and Disney Animation. You’ve worked on Ant Man, Jurassic World, Big Hero 6, Avengers Endgame, the list goes on. Can you give us a sense of what that job entails?

[EH] It is pretty cool! Especially since I get to work in my favourite genres. As a sound designer, I guide the sonic aesthetic of the film by managing the sound effects team and coordinating with the filmmakers, but mostly I’m creating bespoke sounds from scratch: all of the emotional, surreal, or fantastical sounds we cannot record in real life, such as strange creatures, superpowers, spaceships, aliens, magic, and dreamy sequences. I take an organic approach, which involves manipulating and layering recordings of real materials to make something that feels realistic but also sounds otherworldly, exotic, or high tech.

I also do a lot of sound effects editing, which is like painting but with sound, and has a temporal aspect like music. I love the combination.

[GdM] What’s the most challenging sound you’ve had to recreate, or edit? Very much hoping that’s not the most stupid question you’ve ever been asked, but time will tell.

[EH] It’s not at all a stupid question—I get asked this in pretty much every audio interview! Currently the most challenging sound I’ve had to design is the “time shard spears” from Marvel’s Doctor Strange, which are swords made from rips in spacetime itself. The challenge was threefold. For one, I had no visuals or other descriptors besides the name when I started designing, so I was creating off of pure imagination. Two, once we received visual shots, the visual effects ideas continued to evolve, so what might seem like glass at first would become liquid or air, then vibration, perhaps back again. Visual effects intensive films are always a challenge for this reason. Thirdly, it can be very difficult find the right language to discuss sound concepts creatively (for example, “warpy” might conjure a different sonic idea to different people), and that’s exacerbated when the object or event itself is also difficult to describe, as happens often in these genres (like spacetime tearing).

[GdM] You’re also an accomplished swordswoman, rancher, horse trainer, and falconer, to name but a few. How do you choose these random cool things to learn – do you have a grand polymath plan, or do you just wander into them? I’m asking as someone who’s only good at video games.

[EH] I wander into my hobbies, but since I love animals, the outdoors, and crafts, that tends to prescribe me all the fantasy genre hobbies. I would do even more things if I had the time—get back into archery at least—but my free hours have shrunken over the years. Also yes to video games…I’m behind on so many!

[GdM] As someone for whom writing is not the only creative thing in their life, how much importance do you ascribe to it—do you hope to have a lifelong career in it, or would you be fine with it falling away? And do the stresses and problems with modern-day publishing and the increasing difficulties for authors to make careers in it ever influence your thinking in this regard?

[EH] I would love to have a lifelong career as a writer—or at the very least add something meaningful and unique to my genres. I’ve been writing stories and worldbuilding for as long as I can remember, and will continue to do so for the pure joy of the creative process. As you mentioned, the current issues with publishing take out of my hands much of my career, my titles’ visibility and performance, and how I’m treated as an author. Most days it feels like all I can do is continue to write stories that I love and that hold meaning, and hope they’ll find an audience who loves them too.

[GdM] Finally, what can you tell us about your future writing plans? Any new plans to dive back into The Graven? Or any new series in the wings?

[EH] The Graven is done for now! Or at least there is nothing more on the horizon.

I’m currently working on a standalone cross-genre novel that blends the expansive weirdness of Inception, the tranquil horror of Annihilation, and Iain M. Banks’s inclusive world of The Culture. The story leans into my brand of unique and beautiful spectral worlds filled with broken characters who have to break themselves more in order to repair themselves and their world. I hope it finds a home and heads into readers’ hands one day.

Read Casthen Gain by Essa Hansen

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REVIEW: Squid Game Season 3

The third and final season of Squid Game has arrived and the international hit sensation about contestants fighting for survival in a series of deadly games for life changing money finishes on a high. The Korean continues Seong Gui-hun’s attempt at taking the games down from the inside and wraps up the core story whilst leaving ample space for what now looks like the start of a Squid Game universe.

Squid Game S3 is a step up from the slower paced second season. We spend more time on the island where players are trapped and competing in the deadly games and the brutality ramps up in a series that has never shied away from darkness. Whilst Squid Game S3 doesn’t have the freshness of that first season, it is a step up from the plodding second season. Gi-hun is still reeling from his failed rebellion and betrayal by a man he thought was on his side. The Front Man, played brilliantly by Lee Byung-hun (A Bittersweet Life, I Saw the Devil, Terminator: Genysis) is one of the best characters of the season. Looking after the games whilst his brother frantically searches for him, he displays moments of heart that go against his role as the face (or mask?) of the brutal games. He is one of the characters that shows true development and it has been interesting to watch his progression throughout the series. There are emotional moments as characters show some compassion within the games but do not always get the reward they deserve as the deadly nature of the games take over and the greed and corruption in such an environment threaten to take over. Squid Game has always been about what can happen when people truly have their backs against the wall, contestants and guards alike, and it is the choices that are made whilst survival is almost within the grasp of some that make Squid Game S3 standout. The kills are as brutal as they ever have been and there is a sense of loss in this season that permeates as we follow Gi-hun at his lowest. He could have left for America to be with his daughter but instead he starts the season chained up in a room and struggling to find a will to fight any more. Of course, he is given a reason to live and his fight is compelling as he faces incredible odds once more as he tries to save as many people as he can.

There are other story arcs within Squid Game S3 but none really have the depth of Gi-hun’s. There is a final tease of where the show is heading in the future and with Squid Game 87 and Squid Game USA already announced, this isn’t the end of the hit show. Look for more brutality, more downtrodden folk, more greedy capitalist westerners, and Cate Blanchett – I can’t wait!

Whilst it doesn’t hit the heights of the first season, Squid Game S3 is a great send off to what has been a remarkable series. The South Korean show stands alongside stories such as Battle Royale and Hunger Games and adds its own spin to make it stand out against such efforts. Seong Gi-hun is one of the best characters seen on TV this decade and whilst I am glad to see his story wrapped up with a grimdark bow, I am excited for what else is to come.

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REVIEW: Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud

For those who can remember introductory English classes, Crypt of the Moon Spider is like if Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper took place on the moon—with psychic spiders, spider-silk lobotomies and a repressed woman’s eight-legged revenge. In this first novella of what will be The Lunar Gothic Trilogy, Nathan Ballingrud has gifted us with a story that goes from eerie to downright nightmarish, with a feverish ending that I happily savored long after turning the last page (arachnophobes, stay away). 

It’s 1923, and Crypt of the Moon Spider opens with Veronica being dropped off (read: abandoned) by her husband at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, a mental institution on the forested dark side of the moon. It’s run by Dr. Barrington Cull—who can quickly be pegged as the mad scientist sort—and his brutish assistant who Veronica calls Grub. The doctor is renowned for lobotomizing patients and using the silk of the long dead moon spiders to repair their brains. He is aided in surgeries by the white-clad acolytes of the moon spiders, the Alabaster Scholars. Once the surgeries start, Veronica begins to lose grip on reality. She drifts into unsettling flashbacks to her childhood that suggest either Cull or the Scholars are implanting memories, or she’s repressed her dark past. Grub, whose masterfully written and chilling dialog I loved, is revealed to have a surprising role here, too. 

After this slow burn beginning, the plot frantically gallops towards a mind-bending finale. Cleaved skulls, giant spider legs erupting out of brains, and Bene Gesserit style schemes wrap up what is now one of my favorite novellas. 

Setting the book in 1923 allows Barrowfield to mirror the horrific and inhumane treatment of people—and especially women—who suffered from mental health in this era (and still today, though less extreme). At times, I was enraged. At others, heartbroken. As someone who knows the feeling of being institutionalized, I think several passages poignantly communicated that experience. The scene where the door closes to her cell, and she’s sitting alone on her bed, in silence, was deeply moving. There’s a palpable claustrophobia to the whole book, as well. Veronica is confined in her mind, and her life has been confined to the whims of men. This makes her later empowerment, though gruesome, rather satisfying. 

While I was fully onboard with an interesting sci-fi/horror plot, Ballingrud’s elegant, evocative and at times truly arresting writing style was my favorite aspect. Veronica is often lost in detached fantasies to escape her depression, and the book perfectly captures that state with haunting analogies and descriptions of the world around her. The effect of his prose was striking enough that I wanted to reread so many sentences, but the writing was so smooth that I found myself gliding through page after page.

Crypt of the Moon Spider ends up being more of an emotional and sensory experience rather than a cerebral one. The book brings up important ideas of women’s agency and mental health, which definitely helps electrify the end of Veronica’s character arc. However, they seem more like tools to achieve certain emotional payoff moments rather than points of conversation. Not necessarily a shortcoming, but a trade off, especially to maintain the wonderful pacing of this short work. 

I ended up reading Crypt of the Moon Spider twice, and loved lingering in its beautiful, haunting dreamscape just as much both times. Whether you come for the spiders or the prose, I think you’ll leave happily unsettled by both.

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REVIEW: The Bonehunters by Steven Erikson

Steven Erikson’s The Bonehunters is a bloody, ash-covered success that fulfills the promise of war whispered by House of Chains. While the philosophy, sarcasm, and mystery that Erikson is known are found in spades in The Bonehunters, readers should prepare for fire, chaos, claustrophobia, and one of the greatest convergences in Malazan. 

“Show me a god that does not demand mortal suffering.

Show me a god that celebrates diversity, a celebration that embraces even non-believers, and is not threatened by them.

Show me a god that understands the meaning of peace. In life, not in death.”

The Bonehunters is where we really start to see how everything comes together. For those who haven’t read Malazan that sounds almost impossible: we’re on book six and over a million words in. Erikson, however, has been keeping his secrets close to the chest and doling out information slowly, and now, finally, we begin to see the pieces clicking into place. 

The plot of The Bonehunters is nothing short of outstanding. It has war, betrayal, tragedy, and the most frantic fight outside of Abercrombie’s The Heroes. This is arguably Erikson’s fastest pace novel to date, and even though the book is 350,000 words and there’s a chapter that’s 120 pages long, it never, ever feels slow. We alternate between balls-to-the-walls kickassery and normal pace, all the while Erikson takes us on this epic journey. 

Action-wise, it’s arguably Erikson’s best. I may lean towards giving the nod to Memories of Ice, and there’s pockets of greatness in the other novels, but The Bonehunters evokes an epic feeling of danger that I’m just not sure I’ve seen anywhere else. I said this already, but there’s a 120 page chapter in this book and damn it, it flies by. It’s gritty and gruesome and horrible, but it’s so perfectly written that you feel like you’re there, breathing in smoke and slicing your way through the city. 

It’s not just swords and flames that impress in The Bonehunters. There’s magic on display that’s wielded as cleverly and beautifully as ever; there’s undead, confused and desperate; there’s gods trying to reap their own benefits. However, we never lose the human element in these stories, even as they’re often made to feel like ants in a whirlwind. 

Speaking of the human element, the banter and resigned sarcasm of the soldiers is tip-top. Hellian may be the funniest character in Malazan (although I’d still give it to Tehol) but the other soldiers never lose their edge. At this point, you should be familiar enough to know Erikson’s humor to know if it’s for you. The Bonehunters is at times more “in your face,” but it’s still the same style that we’ve grown used to. 

Beneath the banter, though, some of the soldiers hint at mystery, and it’s arguably Erikson’s most enticing yet. One squad in particular meets in the shadows, never fully nefariously, but never innocently either. It doesn’t even feel morally grey or detrimental to the army’s goals, which makes it all the more enticing. 

“Discipline is as much facing the enemy within as the enemy before you; for without critical judgment, the weapon you wield delivers- and let us not be coy here- naught but murder.

And its first victim is the moral probity of your cause.”

There’s essentially two climaxes in The Bonehunters. Both feature a convergence that was hinted at for a long time, but they’re also utterly unique from each other. One is fire, one is shadow. As always, Erikson brings these convergences to mind-bending greatness, but they’re so different that you really have to appreciate how he does it. 

I only have one nitpick with this novel, and unfortunately it comes right at the end. Going into the details of it would put us strictly in spoiler territory, but all I can say is that one group that was promised to be a dire threat fell flat. This single scene felt almost cartoonish to me, and it is one of the main things I remember about The Bonehunters due to where it’s placed. 

Regardless, this book is another masterpiece from Erikson. The Bonehunters is frequently listed as a favorite by the fans and it’s for good reason. If you’re reading this review because you found Midnight Tides too slow or philosophical, The Bonehunters will re-ignite your love for this series; if you happened to read this review because you’re considering the series as a whole, then go forth and trust in Erikson.

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REVIEW: Predator: Killer of Killers

If you’ve watched a few of the Predator movies, you may have wondered, as I did recently when The Predator (2018) came on TV, why, given the size of Earth and all the people on it, do the predators only ever seem to land in the Americas? Predator: Killer of Killers goes some way to giving us a taste of how other peoples face off against the formidable sport-hunter alien in an animated anthology format.

Featuring three stories from across history, Predator: Killer of Killers introduces us to Ursa, Kenji and Torres who each manage to defeat a predator as it hunts among them. Ursa is a Viking shieldmaiden, leading a raiding party of warriors as she seeks revenge for the death of her father. Kenji has fashioned himself as an assassin in early Edo-era Japan and is seeking to prove a point to the brother who betrayed him long ago. Torres is an American pilot in World War II, trying to prove himself while also being pretty handy with a wrench.

Each of these characters’ stories treats the audience to some brutal and clever fight scenes, and the beauty of being animated is it offers the opportunity to explore the weaponry of each predator they face. In live-action, this can be limited by what the props department can build but with animation there’s greater scope to let the imagination off the leash.

These characters’ differing cultures and backgrounds lend them a unique perspective on the aliens they encounter; Kenji describes them as demons, whereas Ursa calls the Predator-in-Chief ‘Grendel King’. Torres is more engineer than hand-to-hand fighter, and uses his affinity for machinery to his advantage. The variety here is a real boon to the story and action in Predator: Killer of Killers.

Each backstory shows us how these characters’ used martial prowess and battle-smarts to defeat the far superior alien species. Every one of them loses a lot in their face-off with the predator and their ultimate reward comes in the final chapter, where they find themselves forced into a battle-royale/Highlander style fight against each other to become a Killer of Killers.

The film, thankfully, doesn’t throw in any magic macguffins to allow the three to understand each other’s languages, though there was certainly an opportunity to, so they have to muddle through speaking only violence in common. They must work together, or destroy each other, to face the Predator’s leader one-on-one. You will have to watch to see who comes out victorious. Available now on Hulu or Disney+, depending on your region, Predator: Killer of Killers is a great addition to the franchise and brings some much needed diversity to the mythos.

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