'Total failure'

The chilling saga of two FBI agents linked by blood

'She hates Israel'

'Unconstitutional, unworkable, and unacceptable'

'Unprecedented'

Great hire!

'Newsmax is far from the only victim'

An international team of astronomers recently found not one, but two of the strangest and rarest of all cosmic objects, and in the same star system no less. Called brown dwarfs, these peculiar objects are invaluable resources for learning about the formation of stars, planets, and systems. These would-be stars fail to accumulate enough mass […] The post The Wild Quadruple Star System Contains Not One, but Two of the Most Illusive Objects in the Galaxy appeared first on Good News Network.

News in remembrance Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, 1942—2025 The author of the Saint Germain cycle was 82. By Molly Templeton | Published on September 3, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, a World Horror Association Grand Master, died this past weekend at the age of 82. The author of more than 80 novels, Yarbro was best known for her Saint Germain Cycle, a historical vampire series that included more than two dozen books and began, in 1978, with Hôtel Transylvania: A Novel of Forbidden Love. She also wrote mysteries, Westerns, fantasy, science fiction, and more. Yarbro began her career as a playwright, writing for what her bio describes as “a now long-defunct children’s theater company.” Before becoming a full-time writer in 1970, she worked as a demographic cartographer, and drafted maps for her own books and books by other writers. Yarbro wrote under several pseudonyms, including Quinn Fawcett (for works co-written with Bill Fawcett), Trystam Kith, Terry Nelson Bonner, T. C. F. Hopkins, Camille Gabor, and Vanessa Pryor. She earned a literary knighthood from the Transylvanian Society of Dracula in 1997, the World Horror Association’s Grand Master award in 2003, became a Living Legend with the International Horror Guild in 2006, and, in 2014, the World Fantasy Convention honored her with a Life Achievement Award. Peter Straub said of her work, “Quinn Yarbro is one of our finest writers and craftspersons, incapable of a sloppy sentence, a slack paragraph, or a fuzzy thought.” A post on Yarbro’s Facebook page goes into some detail about her passing, and says, “Quinn’s health had been declining for some time in ways which gradually limited her mobility, productivity, and communications. Over a year ago she became bedridden, and then her kidneys failed, which required being taken in an ambulance to dialysis three times a week. Despite this very difficult treatment regimen she remained brightly engaged, surrounded by books while binging her favorite TV shows and classical music channels, and enjoying visits from friends.” A memorial service—with magicians, the Facebook post notes—will take place a year and a day after Yarbro’s death. It also mentions that she wrote “several” books that have not yet been published, and that there are plans to re-release some of her out-of-print works. A GoFundMe has been set up to help Yarbro’s sister pay for medical expenses.[end-mark] The post Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, 1942—2025 appeared first on Reactor.

Books Reading the Weird No Idea What We’ll Name It: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster (Part 1) Snyder’s 2023 novel starts with a new pandemic — one that leaves some survivors craving brains… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on September 3, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we’re starting our new longread with Chapters 0-2 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead! Erin Holdaway arrives home from work bone-tired. She immediately goes through a mask-trashing and hand-sanitizing routine; a week before, the world learned of a new pandemic called PVG. CNN has called polymorphic viral gastroencephalitis “the stomach flu on nightmare mode,” but the details remain unknown. People are hospitalized with dangerous symptoms—enough said for Erin and her boyfriend Gregory, who remember coronavirus. Gregory surprises Erin with a fifth anniversary dinner. They feast on sushi and talk about Erin’s workmate Mareva. Both she and her new acquaintance have life sciences degrees and shared fandoms. “Nerds of a feather,” Erin thinks. Too bad the pandemic will prevent them from hanging out. Gregory produces another surprise: an engagement ring. Erin accepts. After a bedroom interlude, Erin calls her father and sister Claire with the news. Claire’s out, Dad’s called away. Just as well, as Erin’s getting a headache and belly cramps. Bad sushi? Soon she’s in the bathroom staring in the mirror at a fever-flushed face and bloodshot eyes. A bloody tear runs down her nose. Next second she’s vomiting violently. Gregory arrives, solicitous until she starts retching up blood. Then he retreats to call 911. As diarrhea hits, she loses consciousness. * * * Some months later. Erin has gone for her monthly appointment with Dr. Shapiro, who’s filling out the routine CDC risk evaluation form. Erin works to hide her tongue, its pores lined with tiny circular teeth. She’s learned to be careful about how she comes across. Type Threes like herself have to endure the questions and tests, and hope there will someday be help for them. Dr. Shapiro asks about Erin’s job, because although chronically ill, Erin must still work. She does the graveyard shift at her old company’s network operations center, where she suspects her co-workers carry tasers in case her craving for gray matter overcomes her. It hasn’t, and her glitchy memory doesn’t interfere too much thanks to operations manuals. Most of Erin’s memories pre-PVG are “insubstantial as dreams; the strongest of them feel like borrowed clothing.” She has a recurring nightmare in which she meets Mareva and a blonde woman in a doctor’s office. Erin feels she knows the blonde but can’t remember her name. The pair hold hands. They’re expecting, Mareva says. Not a child, the blonde clarifies, but a whole new eon. When Erin enters the exam room, she sinks into a tar-pit, from which the blonde pulls her. Now Erin’s in a cheap motel room, with a chestnut-haired woman who says Erin’s not allowed to know her. The woman shoves her out into a parking lot, where Erin falls into pale nothingness. Suddenly sprouted wings save her; she flies over a ravaged city where Mareva and the blonde tend strange poppy-like flowers. Everywhere are piled mutated and tumor-ridden corpses. The stink of doesn’t disturb her, though, and their twisted bodies are pleasant to behold. When Erin wakes, she’s alone in a cold bed. * * * Erin doesn’t remember being transferred from the hospital to Greenlawn, a recommissioned insane asylum. When she comes to, she’s cuffed to a hospital bed. The windows are barred. Her parched hellos bring a woman in blue scrubs and a full-face shield. A huge Taser is clipped to her belt. She introduces herself as Allegra Tesfaye, psychiatric mental health nurse. Greenlawn is a special place for housing PVG convalescents. As for the restraints, she’ll remove them if Erin can prove she won’t “get agitated.” When Erin asks about Gregory, Tesfaye says he’s fine, calls every day, will be glad to hear she’s awake. No, Erin can’t talk to him until they return her phone. The doctor doesn’t want patients worrying themselves with outside news just yet. Next Erin needs to eat. It’s an assessment, important for her treatment plan. Erin agrees to try, then signs forms she’s too groggy to read. Tesfaye returns with a student pushing a food cart, a burly orderly, and Dr. Sallow from pathology. Her IV and restraints removed, she sits up to eat. Erin’s tray contains cups of water, clear soda, apple juice and a deep red fluid like beet juice. Small bowls hold applesauce, vanilla pudding, and warm gray lumpy mush that looks terrible but smells delicious. She must try each item and describe her reactions. The water, soda, and apple juice are okay. The beet juice, however, tastes like salt and iron, raw meat. She spits it out, realizes it’s blood, and demands to know what the hell her watchers are up to. Tesfaye and Sallow only repeat that it’s necessary for her diagnosis. Angry, Erin goes for the grossest dish, the gray mush. Its gelatinous texture is disgusting, and yet she empties the bowl like a starving dog. Back up, the orderly warns: we’ve got a Type Three. Erin is so hungry for mush that she doesn’t question what he means. She tells Sallow the stuff would be even better raw. She demands more. Sallow says they can’t provide it; his trembling voice and sweating forehead tell Erin he’s afraid of her. The realization’s exhilarating. She imagines bashing Sallow’s skull open so she can get at the goodness inside, and she tells him so. Tesfaye steps in, Taser drawn. She tells Erin this rage isn’t her true self. She warns that if Erin doesn’t calm down, she’ll use the Taser, making it much longer before she can go home. Erin’s adrenaline drains, leaving her weak. Sallow admits the mush was brains, mostly bovine, ten percent human. Erin’s appalled when Tesfaye insists this “special diet” is necessary. She weeps, while in her mind a perversion of the children’s song plays: Brains, brains, the magical meat, The worse you feel, the more you eat…. What’s Cyclopean: A “stegosaurian bureaucracy.” The Degenerate Dutch: A man is only afraid of a woman, Erin knows, if she has power. Admittedly, there are better girl powers than craniophagia. Weirdbuilding: They’ve just discovered a “new megacephalopod species,” which I am interpreting as a giant-giant squid. This is like when they kept discovering larger and larger dinosaurs, and running out of prefixes. It’s an underrated problem of apocalypses. Madness Takes Its Toll: Gotham-like, the powers that be are putting their new monsters in a “recommissioned insane asylum” to be sorted. Ruthanna’s Commentary Magdala, it turns out, is the town from which Mary Magdalene hails, a.k.a. she’s a Magdalene like I’m a Cape Codder. I’m Jewish, I had no idea. Like Cape Cod it’s known for fishing; unlike Cape Cod it’s known for mythological origin stories. The amygdala, on the other hand, is part of the vertebrate limbic system; you have one in each temporal lobe of your brain. On a lay and literary level it’s associated with fear. However, it’s actually responsible for processing emotion more generally along with its connection to memory. From an extremely practical perspective, emotion is how you label the importance of events, both degree and kind, and thus the importance of retrieving information from those events. So you got attacked by a rampaging mammoth here, and your amygdala makes sure that you’ll be super-cautious next time you’re in the area, or avoid it all together. This person was nice to you, so positive emotions encourage you to hang out with them again. It’s not where you store memories, but it’s central to laying them down and keeping them fresh. I’m guessing that for a new-hatched zombie, the amygdala is particularly delicious. So “Magdala Amygdala,” in addition to being a tongue-twister, suggests a mythosian origin for memory and emotion, or the formation of memories for myth. Perhaps something that comes out of the sea? Something both within and beyond oneself. It’s certainly not as on-the-nose as Megiddo Amygdala, say. But we do find ourselves on the cusp of an apocalypse. “Apocalypse” can be an end of the world, but more literally means a revelation bringing about a new age. “The means of mediation,” quoth Wikipedia, “include dreams, visions and heavenly journeys”. Erin dreams of acquaintance Mareva, a mysterious blonde, and another woman whose name she isn’t allowed to know. (Shades of the Woman in White?) They’re expecting a new eon—“But we haven’t any idea what we’ll name it.” Which suggests that the nature of the eon is yet to be settled. From a current-age perspective, though, it doesn’t seem promising. Plague is one of the apocalyptic horse-entities, and rarely welcome except by a particular sort of political death cultist. Polymorphic viral gastroencephalitis seems a particularly nasty one. Not only does it give you the stomach flu from hell, but it does so in the process of modifying your digestive system. Some people, apparently, come out with a taste for blood. And some, like Erin, come out craving braaaiiiiins. You can’t, apparently, tell type from the particular type of body horror visible on the surface. So lamprey tongues, for example, don’t automatically go with Type 3s. (There are at least two other types, so what’s the non-blood one? I have a feeling it’s not “eats perfectly normal non-disturbing food, just with the tooth-tongue.”)  No wonder they don’t want Erin doomscrolling. Imagine all the misinformation that X has to offer about how to keep your zombie hungers under control. Just eat fresh vegetables and avoid vaccines, and you’ll be fine, we promise. Or just eat the brains of people who deserve it. We’re sure there are plenty to go ‘round. And stay at work; a new eon is no excuse to neglect the demands of capitalism. Anne’s Commentary Page one of Sister, Maiden, Monster, and I was already detecting the miasma of plague in the breeze off the pages. As long as that foulness is strictly fictional, it’s as delicious a scent to me as rugosa roses and dark chocolate. Many of us have lived through multiple contagion crises and scares. For me, there have been various influenzas, AIDS, Legionnaire’s disease, SARS-CoV-1, MERS, Ebola, Zika, Nipah, MRSA, West Nile, and Lyme disease. Probably none of us has lived through the shifting waves of COVID-19 without being old enough to recognize the emblems of a thoroughly modern pandemic. Erin Holdaway enters the novel stripping off a KN95 mask and dropping it into an improvised biohazard bin by her apartment door. Next she applies hand sanitizer. Applies it twice after touching her possibly contaminated keys. Smart moves, Erin, though a NIOSH-approved N95 mask would provide optimal protection against insidious airborne viral particles. I’m surprised germophobic Gregory let her go out without NIOSH approval! He’s quick enough to get major social distancing from Erin once she starts showing hemorrhagic symptoms reminiscent of Poe’s Red Death, whose mark is the horror of brightly-colored blood. He also starts fumigating the apartment with Lysol, though the must-knows about PVG remain terrifyingly unknown. Such as how it’s spread, how to disinfect a contaminated area, and what’s the long-term prognosis. If any. PVG is becoming one of my favorite fictional viruses. “Polymorphic” suggests the disease exhibits multiple forms or outcomes, perhaps associated with variant viral forms. “Gastroencephalitis” suggests GI ravages that involve the central nervous system as well. Chapter one ups the “polymorphic” ante by confirming that infection has altered Erin’s tongue into an organ with pores like missile silos housing tiny circular teeth. She tries to hide the change, even though she knows Dr. Shapiro’s probably seen “fifteen far more grotesque” PVG-related deformities that morning. The big clue to what the tiny teeth might be used for is the way Erin’s brain has been altered. Part of it is now “always alert and restless no matter what [she does.] Hungry-predator gray matter [she] can’t leash or satisfy.” This hypervigilance has wrecked her sleep cycle. Dr. Shapiro is rightly concerned about Erin’s insomnia, which can only weaken her resistance to the APUs (Acquired Predatory Urges) that make her a potential menace to society—hence the CDC’s monthly risk evaluations. I doubt that Erin has shared her recurring dream with Shapiro, as it ends in her sprouting wings and soaring like a “raptor” over a ruin-scape of mutated human corpses. The problem isn’t the grotesque imagery. It’s Erin’s reaction to it. The “stink of festering flesh” is to raptor-Erin “no more disturbing than the delicate scent of cherry blossoms”; the sight of “people who had died in abject misery” is as pleasant as “nodding sunflower heads.” Chapter two jumps back to Erin’s first fully conscious day since her illness began. She wakes up in Greenlawn, a former insane asylum repurposed into a special convalescent hospital for patients that other facilities “aren’t equipped to properly care for.” That explanation from Nurse Tesfaye might be unnerving, ditto the huge Taser hanging conspicuously on her belt, but Tesfaye is so calm, so sympathetic. Greenlawn must be a good place, so Erin signs electronic forms she doesn’t really understand. She agrees to the odd diagnostic test involving “soft” foods she must sample and comment on. It’s only through this test that her caretakers will learn how to treat her. They don’t tell her the test will determine her PVG victim “type,” or even that there are types. It turns out she’s the most dangerous polymorphic variant, inspiring fear in student nurse Lisa, Dr. Sallow, and even massive orderly Darius. At that point, Erin has spit out a sample of human blood in outrage. I’m assuming a Type One would be a “normal” who rejected all but the “normal” samples. I’m further assuming a Type Two would enthusiastically quaff the blood sample but reject the bovine and human brains that Erin wolfs down. The ferocity with which she demands more, and threatens Dr. Sallow, marks her as a Type Three. Final assumptions: A lust for blood is diagnostic of a vampire post-PVG variant. A lust for brain matter is diagnostic of a zombie variant. To the horror writer, PVG is a double gift, and perhaps there are variants yet to be discovered. Tesfaye tells Erin the hungry predator is not what she wants to be. She’s right. Whenever Erin wakes from her recurrent dream, it hits her like a nightmare. She wants to scream to purge its images. She has dry heaves. In rare lucid moments during her sickness, she just wanted to get to the future she planned with Gregory. Coming down from her brains-fueled rage in Greenlawn, she sobs her rawest truth: “I wanna go home.” I want her to go home, too, but I fear it won’t be anything like her pre-PVG home. Next week, we look for trouble on the back roads in Stephen Graham Jones’ “Refinery Road.” You can find it in Ellen Datlow’s When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired By Shirley Jackson.[end-mark] The post No Idea What We’ll Name It: Lucy Snyder’s <i>Sister, Maiden, Monster</i> (Part 1) appeared first on Reactor.