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Books book review Small Town Horror: The Dark We Know by Wen-Yi Lee A review of Wen-Yi Lee’s new young adult horror novel. By Alex Brown | Published on August 14, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Isadora Chang left home two years ago. She’d grown up in an oppressive, small mining town in the middle of nowhere, but after two of her friends died by suicide, she fled. Fled the deaths that haunted the town going back decades. Fled the mother that wouldn’t talk to her and the father that abused her. She thought she escaped, that art school got her out for good. But even that has turned sour. She’s so broke she’s crashing on the couch at her part time job, and she’s at risk of failing out of her art program if she can’t complete her portfolio. Thing is, she did actually finish it, she just doesn’t remember doing it. Her pieces are horror shows, all twisted figures in grotesque positions, people from back home dying in terrible ways. And then her own father dies. And then Isa has to return to Slater. And then things get worse. Back home, her mother has spiraled out of control and sealed all the windows shut, and her older sister, Trish, is sleepwalking more than ever. Slater is ruled by the Vandersteen family, who helped found the town and now run the local clinic, fund pretty much everything, and always get their way. Two years ago, Isa was friends with Mason, Wren, and Zach. When Mason was blamed for Wren’s death, Isa wasn’t there to help him. Now here he is, begging her to listen to him when he says a monstrous spirit is killing kids and only the two of them can do something about it. Because he’s not wrong. Their shared trauma connects them not just to each other but to the darkness at the heart of Slater as well. And that darkness has its eyes on Isa. We’re in a veritable golden age of YA horror right now, and it takes a lot to stand out from the crowd. You’ve got to have an interesting premise, compelling characters, and a strong grasp on the craft. Wen-yi Lee handles all three well. We don’t get much small town horror in YA, real small town, not just a suburb or a small city. Lee set The Dark We Know in a dried up mining town in the middle of winter, when everything is cold and dreary and dead. Slater is the kind of place where everyone is all up in everyone else’s business and the only places to hang out are the local diner and the woods. The plot unfolds slowly (perhaps a little too slowly), before ratcheting up in intensity and fervor until it’s got you hooked. While I remain unconvinced by the handwaving that goes on to explain what’s actually happening in the town, the confrontations with the monstrous being are entertaining and chilling.  Buy the Book The Dark We Know Wen-Yi Lee Buy Book The Dark We Know Wen-Yi Lee Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget As for characters, some work better than others. Isa is a rich tapestry of nuance and frustration. She’s trying so hard to not be the person she was when she left Slater that she doesn’t know who she is when she finally returns. She denies her friends and family thinking it’s what they (and she) deserves only to realize just how wrong she’s been. I appreciated how Lee allowed her to grapple with her abusive childhood and all her father took from her while also trying to figure out how to build something new out of all that rubble. There are a lot of teens who need to see someone else go through that journey to help them as they navigate their own journey. Mason, too, has a troubled past he’s trying to sort out. He’s learning where the line is between rebellion and troublemaker and what he thinks about the new identities he’s discovering in himself. Trish, Otto Vandersteen, and Isa’s mother get less development, to their detriment. Others are vital to the plot but wholly forgettable as characters. Because they’re so underdeveloped, they feel more like plot devices than people.  One thing that pleasantly surprised me was the lack of romance. While relationships happen in the background—Isa had a failed date back at art school, Mason dated Wren and kissed someone else—romance isn’t a subplot. In young adult fiction nowadays, romance is everywhere. Romance is so predominant that platonic relationships can feel like a rarity. I spent much of the novel waiting for that inevitable moment when Isa caught feelings for one of the secondary characters, but it never came. This really is a book about the two main characters having a platonic relationship! The power of friendship will save us all. It’s not that I don’t like romance in my fiction, it’s more that it’s nice to have some variety. Teens need to know that they have the option to date outside the compulsory heterosexual social norms, but they also need to know that they don’t have to date at all and that you can in fact just be friends with someone you might otherwise find attractive. Wen-yi Lee’s The Dark We Know is a visceral, atmospheric young adult horror novel. Like the monster haunting the town, this novel will get its claws into you. Readers who like social horror, small town horror, and stories about queer teens confronting their traumas should pick up this engrossing novel. [end-mark] The Dark We Know is published by Zando/Gillian Flynn Books. The post Small Town Horror: <i>The Dark We Know</i> by Wen-Yi Lee appeared first on Reactor.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge. Another domino falls for recession as job creation turns negative for small businesses, which employ nearly half of all Americans. In the past year, payrolls for companies with under 50 employees plunged by nearly 100,000, while job trends were flat for midsized businesses up to 500 employees. The only bright spot was big businesses—which might be changing, given recent layoff announcements, including 2,500 at Chrysler, 4,000 at Cisco, 12,000 at Dell, and 15,000 at Intel. Paramount and the left-wing Axios both cut 10% to 15% of their workforce. Economics writer Mike “Mish” Shedlock reports the numbers, adding that he’s “seen enough” and thinks the recession has already begun—possibly starting last October. The media have been saying recession’s impossible because unemployment is low and there’s still production, but Shedlock notes that recessions typically start during periods of low unemployment and positive industrial production. Because the employers and producers don’t yet know it’s a recession—that’s the whole point—they keep chugging along, straight off the cliff. Incidentally, part of the reason they’re blindsided is specifically because the thousands of Ph.D. economists at the Fed and Treasury are specifically instructed to hide bad news. They call this “forward guidance,” and you’ll recognize it from those late-night press conferences when [Fed Chairman] Jerome Powell and [Treasury Secretary] Janet Yellen tell us everything is fine. Meanwhile, Shedlock notes that even that low unemployment may be an illusion, since he expects a potentially million-plus jobs revision—780,000 from three quarters of 2023 alone. This is coming from the infamous—well, infamous among labor statisticians—“birth-death model,” where the Bureau of Labor Statistics guesses how many companies are creating jobs and pretends it’s real. Note this million-job gap is different from the gap with household surveys—where you actually ask people if they’ve got a job. There, my colleague E.J. Antoni estimates jobs could be overcounting by 2 million or more. So, what’s next? Jobs are the single most important economic indicator after inflation, not only because jobs are life-or-death for voters, [and] people who lose their jobs become single-issue voters. But also because jobs are a near-perfect predictor of recession. Once you start to lose jobs, you’re essentially guaranteed a recession. To illustrate, in the last three normal recessions—1990, 2001, and 2008—the recession started either the same month or within two months of unemployment rising, but they didn’t officially recognize the recession until nine to 12 months after it began. In other words, don’t bother listening to the official numbers. Even they admit that jobs always call it first. That’s also why it’s so tempting for the government to lie on jobs numbers; for example, counting part-time gigs as full jobs, not counting people who’ve given up looking for work, or just old-fashioned statistical adjustment. If history’s a guide, going by jobs, we’re on the edge of recession, they’re just waiting until after November to admit it. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Recession Fears Loom as Small Business Job Numbers Tank appeared first on The Daily Signal.

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to better discern Jesus’ great parable on the organic tension between God and mammon. I am always smitten with Jesus’ admonition that shrewdness matters profoundly in the navigation of life. Having lived my professional life in Washington, D.C., this tension between the world and Providence seems to come to the fore more often than any other single pressure point, and none more so than in our contemporary era. Plato, the founder of Western philosophy, wrote 25 timeless texts. Among his nuggets of gold: “The measure of a man is what he does with power.” Plato was imagining measurable power over the lives of others. I suspect the Greek philosopher also was thinking about the power each of us has over ourselves, the idea of self-mastery—and not merely power over others. An observation often attributed to another great man in the public square, Abraham Lincoln, but probably not written or said by him, has a cogency that rings true: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” Presidential historian Tevi Troy, a prolific and lyrical writer, has written a delightful new book examining the organic relationships between U.S. presidents and captains of commerce and industry during various vicissitudes of public life. Troy was a White House colleague of mine in the Bush-Cheney administration. For tourists and other visitors in Washington during this shank of summer, where presidential history seems to lurk around every corner, his book “The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry” (Regnery History) is precisely the right book to pack in the suitcase. “The Power and the Money” helps us better understand how presidents and businessmen and businesswomen have navigated the endlessly fascinating dance of power and influence. Making more than cameo appearances in Troy’s book: Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and a couple of Henrys—Ford and Luce. This is a page-turner to be sure, and 12 other outsize business personalities charm its narrative. A writer for The Jerusalem Post observed: “What readers will find fascinating is the increasing entanglements of big government with big business, neither of which is popular with the American people.”  Troy effectively negates and dispels much of what we think we know about this so-called bipartisan entanglement of business and politics. Which is to say that in the American experience, this relationship has been going on from early in our republic. And the author rightly demonstrates that it is a series of relationships that often redounds to the benefit of the public—not the opposite—across nearly 150 years of fascinating American history. I am particularly interested in how faith infuses or suffuses the relationships between presidents and business leaders. Troy memorably evokes two of these. The founder of Time magazine, Henry Luce, was born in Penglai, Yantai, China, and raised there by Christian missionaries. Luce was bathed in a deep faith from boyhood. Decades ago, Luce famously gave voice to how Christian faith informed not only his business practices but his high profile in the public square: “I am a Protestant, a Republican, and a free enterpriser, which means I am biased in favor of God, Eisenhower, and the stockholders of Time Inc.—and if anyone who objects doesn’t know this by now, why the hell are they still spending 35 cents for the magazine.” A corollary is the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood. The Warner Brothers, Henry and Jack, were of Jewish faith and their religious tradition was directly related to their pro-American films. The Warners loved America deeply, and their studio’s films reflected that infusion of faith and patriotism. The famous movie director Billy Wilder once said: “Studios had faces then. They had their own style. They could bring you blindfolded into a movie house, and you opened it and looked up and you knew.”  It is refreshing that an important presidential historian does not ipso facto join the conventional narrative that businesspeople are often up to no good and are only or mostly self-interested when it comes to interaction with the political class—and especially our presidents. Troy gives us ample examples for good and bad, to be sure. But what is so nourishing and refreshing about this fine new book is that Troy shows the measurable benefits of having keen business minds involved in the dance of public policy, where the tension between God and mammon is as timeless, depthless, and roiling as ever. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Presidents, Power, Faith, and the Boardroom appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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