Excerpts Horror Read an Excerpt From Tapeworm by A.P. Thayer A group of friends must confront questions of identity, aging, and desire during a vampire infestation in an isolated Californian desert. By A.P. Thayer | Published on July 22, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Tapeworm by A.P. Thayer, a body-horror vampire novel publishing with Evil Twin on August 18th. We’re thrilled to also include an excerpt from the audiobook edition of Tapeworm, read by Lee Osorio. Click here to jump straight to the audio excerpt! After the recent separation from his wife Trish, Victor hopes his friends’ annual weekend retreat to the Californian desert town of Superstition will loosen him up and reforge the group’s fraying bonds. But something is waiting underneath Superstition, crawling its way into their group, and feeding into their desires. Victor knows too well what it means to repress his desires. He’s always attempted to be the perfect partner, yet often found himself lacking. With Trish skipping the trip, he begins falling into the wild underbelly of Superstition in new ways. When the leader of the town’s Welcoming Committee approaches him with a romantic, sexually charged offer, Victor wonders if it’s too good to be true.But the Welcoming Committee expects a price to be paid for its services. One that cannot be fulfilled by willing bodies alone. By the end of the weekend, group bonding will have developed a whole new meaning. Because something is hungry for Victor and his friends. Buy the Book Tapeworm A.P. Thayer Buy Book Tapeworm A.P. Thayer Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Prologue The earthquake that shakes Superstition Valley is uncharacteristic, not because quakes are rare there but because of the aftershocks that plague the valley for so long afterward. As the region eventually returns to baseline seismic activity, one final echo reverberates deep beneath the ground. One final rumble, and then the earth shifts and cracks. From this wound, It oozes, a formless mist of yellow, awakened to a new world and new sensations. A prisoner no more. Alive once again. As it shakes off the millennia of sleep, it delights in the sensory input of this new world. Temperature and the passage of time. Thoughts and emotions. Pain. That of others as well as the pain of its own hunger. The land was dead and desolate when it had been bound. Not a single plant grew in that desert basin. No life called it home. It was little more than a forgotten corner of the world in which to be exiled. Not so anymore. Hungrily, it stretches toward the sandy surface with its twisting cacti and blooming wildflowers, a basin surrounded by mountains crowned with jagged peaks. Above, the fiery orb of the sun, its ancestral enemy, burns bright, harsh, and deadly. The creature will have to wait until the sun sinks below the horizon and the valley falls into shadow. Only then can it truly be free. Near the center of the desert basin, a victim—human, female, flesh—slams a sliding glass door. The shockwave rolls over the creature’s body, through its near-interminable coil of muscled segments that writhe beneath the surface, flexing, contorting, and growing. It births tendrils that stretch out through the packed clay and loose sand, inching toward the woman. She has deep brown hair that shines in the dying light of day. A breeze rolls across the valley and pulls loose strands free, whipping them behind her in a way that makes the creature salivate. The woman’s emotions are a heady mixture, too. Complex—tainted by grief and weighed down by longing. The creature recognizes an echo of its own centuries-old anger within the woman’s pain and an overwhelming feeling of being trapped. Her maelstrom of emotional carnage is a vessel to inhabit. A new home, even, perhaps. Sadness, frustration, a life lost. Lives. Understanding continues to grow within the creature beneath the sands, understanding of the woman as well as the world to which it has awakened. Voices are coming from inside the house as others prepare to depart. They have just spent a long weekend together. There is embarrassment, feigned joy, and annoyance pulsing off them. There is a gulf between her and them that is growing wider with every beat of her heart. Something within her is calling out to be rescued. “Fuck,” she whispers, and the creature wriggles a little closer, as if that one word is an invitation. A hundred feet below, the creature’s ancient young finally wake and pour from the cracks in their prisons, awakened by their mother’s return. The remains of the creature’s prison—the vast underground lake, the unending cavern, the impenetrable darkness—fill with the old young. The wardens, ageless hummingbirds, flitter about, dive-bombing the water to feast on the squirming young, preventing their escape. There is no way out for the spawn, though. Not that way. But their sacrifices are only a distraction. The creature, in the meantime, extends itself farther through the new crack. The hummingbirds do not hear the creature’s escape. They are unaware of its new freedom, too busy destroying generation after generation of young. No matter. There will be more. The door slides open again, and another human—male, mate, prey—steps into the late autumn chill of the valley. The wind is picking up, and what heat the sand collected during the day leaks away like blood from a wound. “Trish.” The man’s voice is strained. Half annoyance, half exhaustion. He has a duffel bag gripped in his hand, the cloth twisted in his fist like it’s the only thing keeping him from losing control. The woman, Trish, ignores him. Her eyes are shining and unfocused, her lips pursed and trembling. Her heart hammers within her chest, pumping hot, sweet blood through her veins. The creature groans out in hunger. It has not eaten in so, so long. He sits down next to her and stares into the desert, too. Their relationship is a bloated dead thing, waterlogged and expanding with gas as they struggle to keep it ambulatory, even as the flesh sloughs away. Flies swarm thickly on the putrid cadaver, eager to glut themselves on the sweet rot of what could have been and what might have been. An exquisite corpse, swollen with maggots. A mound of decayed hope and necrotized dreams. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he says finally. A lie. He did. “It’s fine,” she responds, and it isn’t, but that’s okay. They have both made up their minds about the other but are too cowardly to do anything about it. Instead, they gather with friends in attempts to recapture the youth they once had. The yearly vacation is over, though, and the charade didn’t even last the weekend. He slides his hand into hers, but there’s a lifelessness in their touch that has become them. He squeezes, and she shudders. Involuntary revulsion. Anger flares in him, and he lets go. Neither of them is in control anymore. The sun sets lower. The day has grown long, now. The shadows of the distant peaks have almost reached them, jagged peaks crawling across the sandy floor, history’s slowest charge. The creature stretches out and… Its flesh sears in the light of the sun, and it recoils into the safety of the ground. Too soon, too soon! It must be patient. Patient. What is a few more moments after so many millennia? “Let’s go home.” Beneath the anger and barely contained judgment, there is a hint of an apology that will never come. It is too choked with the oily residue of his ego. “We’re tired. We don’t drink this much anymore.” Excuses. Lies. The creature savors the falsehoods. Trish scoffs at the “we.” He swallows. A sore subject, but what isn’t these days? They sit in silence, unwilling to retread that particular argument, unwilling to move forward. Time dribbles past. Almost there… The shadows finally reach her bare feet, and the creature’s corpse-white tendril darts out, stabbing beneath the cuticle of her pinky toe, hungry for the warmth of her flesh, where it pulls itself beneath her skin with hooked barbs. She gasps. “Something bit me.” He sighs and lifts her foot, his treatment roughened by exhaustion and irritation. Like this is one more thing to deal with. There is a delightful hole in his being where patience and empathy once lived. A burrow in which to nest, if only the creature can get to him, too. “I don’t see anything,” he sniffs, confirming his own hypothesis. He can never be wrong. She rises to the bait. An explosion of anger, like the heat of a furnace when the door is pulled open. “Am I being dramatic again?” Her venom splatters all over his front. He recoils. She pulls her foot away and curls her toe to inspect her nail. There’s no mark. The creature didn’t leave a trace, after all. It salivates inside her, instead, and feeds on the anger just as it feeds on her. The male—his name is Vic—takes a deep breath to calm himself. He knows they still must drive home together. They still must live together. He thinks if he keeps everything civil, they can each go to their separate corners of the apartment, leave each other alone, and the relationship can stumble on. She catches a ripple of movement beneath her skin. The creature makes her forget. It leaks excretions into her bloodstream, spiking her cortisol and adrenaline, pumping her full of norepinephrine. It stokes the furnace of her anger and doesn’t let her move on. Go on. “Answer me,” she hisses, less in control of herself than usual. “Can we not?” He asks, his voice quiet and controlled. He relishes her loss of control. “You used—” “Used to what?” she snarls. He swallows the vicious response gurgling up the back of his throat, then speaks with deliberate pauses between the words as if speaking to a child. He thinks he is winning, so he pulls his punch. “Used to be sweeter.” “I used to be happy, too,” she spits back at him, even though what she’s really thinking is We used to love each other. “Oh, whatever,” he snaps, losing his fragile control like he lost it earlier in the weekend. This outburst hurts her less. The creature oozes free from her ear canal and stretches toward him, eager to taste him, too. Vic moves away. “Come on, we have to go.” The creature burrows back into her skull, where it drips honeyed poison into her prefrontal cortex. “I wish I still wanted to touch you,” she says, whispering, and the creature forces her to smile while she says it. His shame and anger flare white hot, but he does what he so often does. Retreats. He pushes away from her and bites his tongue. Represses and seethes. Bottles it up. When he’s a few steps away, he stops, almost brave enough to give voice to his true feelings. “Get your shit together,” he says instead. “I don’t want to be stuck in traffic.” He slams the sliding glass door hard. The creature shivers at the vibration, and therefore so does Trish. Tears form, but they are of anger more than grief. There are two kinds of pain within her. The pain of loss and the pain of rejection. Two sides of the same coin—ego. Her aching fights against the misery that is their life, their apartment, their friends… All the things that have knotted them together, impossible to separate. The creature floats around inside of her, indolent in its consumption, and slips behind her retinas. It sees their relationship play out linearly, as humans experience time. Bathes in the way they used to love each other, warms itself with the memory of their fiery need, now long dead. Altered states, flashing lights, loud music. The details have changed since its imprisonment, but the celebrations taste the same. It floats in the happy future Trish imagined for them when they first met. Vic was her salvation from a life of pain and solitude. That fantasy has almost fully slipped away, so the creature latches on, hooks into the dream, and drags it to the forefront of her mind. It forces her to relive those memories over and over and over. Makes her experience them as both the subject and the observer. It overwhelms her passivity. It drowns her denial. It suffocates her acceptance. Makes her remember without the frenetic energy of a cocktail of drugs and the haze of alcohol. Then it impregnates her fantasies with new possibilities. A lifetime together, as they once were. Joy. Love. Desire… All the things she once had. All the things she could have again. Do you want this? She hiccups. She misses who she was then. She misses who she thought they were going to be. She feels lost now. She was happy and can be once again. Right? Of course. On the other side of the house, the friend group is loading their vehicles. Their voices are carried by the cutting wind. Another weekend ritual finished, and another failed attempt at recapturing what used to be. Another step closer to the grave, but to her, they’re already dead. They can truly live, too. Her eyes are unfocused, and tears have streaked her foundation. They plummet to the ground, lost in the growing shadows. Vic drags Trish’s large suitcase from their room, past the sliding glass door, and down the front hall. This time, there is no need for the creature to manipulate. Trish remembers Vic as he was back then. Fun. Happy. Playful. She remembers the passion with which he loved her. The strength with which he fucked her. Anger and pain flare within her again as she remembers the sorry state of their marriage. Purple twilight settles over the landscape, casting the world into the purgatory between night and day. Like the purgatory she has been living in. I can make it better. She takes a sobbing breath and straightens, her head falling backward, her face up to the darkening sky, and she screams her frustration to the first glimmering stars. Her friends are saying goodbye in the foyer, ready to drive back to Los Angeles. They pretend not to hear her. “Yes,” she answers, as the echoes of her fury fade away. The creature has her now. Its voice is sickly sweet, cocooning her in promises while tendrils of itself spread and spread, taking over every part of her, settling into the new body while it waits for what will come next. A hummingbird hovers nearby, tasting the air, sensing something is wrong. The creature sends one impulse, and she moves like a snake, snatching the bird’s tiny body from the air and squeezing. She takes a ragged breath and brushes away her tears, already looking forward to next year’s trip. She does not notice herself wiping the crushed bird’s body onto the desert floor. “Everything will be better.” Listen to the audio excerpt: Excerpted from Tapeworm, copyright © 2026 by A.P. Thayer. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Tapeworm</i> by A.P. Thayer appeared first on Reactor.

News Dungeons & Dragons Jimothy the Raccoon Has Been Added to Dungeons & Dragons Jimothy the raccoon’s cultural takeover has reached another milestone By Matthew Byrd | Published on July 22, 2026 Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures Recent days have seen me wake up and desperately search for an excuse to write about Jimothy: the Seattle raccoon that has gone viral in the best way we can hope for a raccoon to go viral. Alas, as we at least try to bring you news about genre entertainment around here, the opportunity has yet to present itself. That is until today when the Dungeons & Dragons social media team decided to bless this humble vessel by adding a Jimothy cryptid to D&D Beyond. Some (very necessary) context before we move on. Jimothy is the name given to a raccoon who has recently been spotted in the Seattle area. The critter quickly garnered attention for its somewhat unusual frame, which is believed to be the result of a spinal condition. Yet, millions have looked upon Jimothy’s long legs that carry his wonderfully round body towards glory at unusually high speeds and have found hope. You could make the argument that Jimothy’s rise to fame can be at least partially attributed to our love of watching something not only survive but thrive in a world that feels pretty rough right now. Jimothy is also just unbelievably cute in a rather unique way. As Kiana Hall, the Seattle resident who is often credited for naming the raccoon, said, “He just looks like a Jimothy.” In the last week or so, various individuals and organizations have paid tribute to Jimothy in their own ways. Local artists have painted murals of Jimothy, the Seattle Mariners updated their social media profile to pay homage to Jimothy, and NASA has even proclaimed Jimothy to be the ruler of Seattle. As noted above, Jimothy was also recently added to D&D Beyond: the official digital toolset for Dungeons & Dragons. As shared by the Dungeons & Dragons Twitter account, Jimothy has been added to D&D Beyond as a cryptid: a rare creature in the universe that borders on mythological. Jimothy even has his own D&D character sheet, which features not only the raccoon’s stats (Jimothy’s charisma is understandably quite high) but a few unique Traits and Actions. For instance, Jimothy’s “Agile” Trait allows him to move out of an enemy’s reach, while his “Compact Frame” trait enables him to move through especially small spaces. Of course, Jimothy has the ability to perform a “Hurl Garbage” Action which not only serves as a ranged attack but leaves the target “stinky.” Jimothy, Beloved Cryptid (as he is formally known in D&D Beyond), is hardly the first real-life figure to get a nod from the D&D team. Yet of all the tributes to his name, there is certainly something appropriate about honoring our beloved raccoon by treating him like the mythological figure he most certainly is.[end-mark] The post Jimothy the Raccoon Has Been Added to Dungeons & Dragons appeared first on Reactor.

Books Reading the Weird ROUSes Abound: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 12) Arthur’s confession reaches its conclusion, 100 years in the future… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on July 22, 2026 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 wrap up Stephen Graham Jones’s Nebula- and Stoker-winning The Buffalo Hunter Hunter with Chapters 23-24. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! The Absolution of Three-Persons, June 2, 1912. Arthur Beaucarne pens one last journal entry. On Sunday, all the eggs in the church crack black-yolked with ungodly corruption, so he precracks a yellow-yolked egg from the parsonage for display at mass. The service is still doomed. The purple stole on his podium has been replaced by a buffalo robe. In addition to his parishioners, the dead crowd the pews: Arthur’s son and grandsons, postmaster Clarkson and Sheriff Doyle and Pinkerton man Dove, and all the Blackfeet slain at the Marias. Arthur flees into the parsonage. No one inquires after him. Their preacher has turned leper. Before Good Stab comes for him, he’ll hide this journal. Soon he’ll see Good Stab’s fangs and know he wasn’t lying. Arthur’s heart feels black as the prairie night. His pipe is empty. He believes it’s been empty since January 23, 1870. The Beaucarne Manuscript, 12 January 2013. Etsy Beaucarne has presented her transcription of Arthur’s journal to her tenure committee. They’re unimpressed. One member shows off by remarking that Etsy should call her great-great-great-grandfather her “tresayle” instead—the French are “so much more efficient when discussing lineage.” They also suggest the so-called log may be fiction inspired by Stoker’s Dracula. And so Etsy, the “dayworker” of Communications and Journalism, won’t earn tenure at the University of Wyoming. At the end of spring semester, aged 43, she’ll need to figure out how to earn a living outside academia. One more disappointment for her father, on his deathbed in Denver. At least Etsy’s figured out some of her ancestry. Arthur’s son Benjamin Flowers, her great-great grandfather, was born to Ada Neismith, née Murray, the prostitute he bedded after the Marias Massacre. Benjamin’s surname came from the nurse who misheard “Beaucarne” as “Bouquet” and translated that to “Flowers.” The surname passed to Etsy’s great-grandfather Arthur, then to her grandfather Artemis. Later Ada told Artemis the correct name, and so it came down to Etsy. On her apartment balcony, she burns the copy of the journal that librarian Lydia Ackerman sent her. As the last page lifts away “like a prayer,” she glimpses through the snowstorm a figure behind a tree. She lurches backward so hard she breaks the glass sliding door. Somehow she’s sure it’s Arthur Beaucarne, her tresayle, haunting her. 20 January 2013. A bad week. Etsy’s cat Taz has disappeared. Her father has died, leaving a banker’s box of effects. Among family photos, his last unsmoked cigarettes, his wedding band, and his Zane Grey novels and DVDs, is his Bible with letters from her mother tucked inside, along with one unopened letter. Lydia Ackerman calls to say that the journal’s buckskin wrapping tested out as human skin! Also, has Etsy decided what to do with the original journal in Lydia’s care? Donate it? Auction it? Keep it herself? And Dad’s cremains arrive. Etsy looks at the unopened letter. Ominously, the envelope bears the logo of the Blackfoot nation, but no postmark or stamp. She realizes the letter wasn’t for her father, but for her, delivered in person while Dad lay dying. She doesn’t open it. She’s taking Benadryl to sleep, though it makes her “goopy” enough to hallucinate mice. What’s no hallucination is the figure she wakes to find: Good Stab tapping on her laptop. He’s grown a buffalo’s head; she screams and locks herself in her bedroom. Etsy’s next entry is neither a will or a suicide note, just a record of terror. Good Stab has returned Taz. He’s also arranged a “family reunion” in the form of Arthur Beaucarne, whom he’s made a nachzehrer. What Arthur’s been fed over decades, he has become: a giant prairie dog weeping blood. Good Stab disappears, leaving behind Arthur and his buffalo head (actually a mask). Etsy can’t keep a Rodent of Unusual Size like some rescue animal. She senses his existence is a hellish one. Has Good Stab given her the challenge of murderously feeding Arthur back to human shape, or putting him out of his misery? She sedates him with smoke from her father’s cigarettes and smuggles him into her Subaru, along with Taz and gear from a hardware/ranch superstore. Then she drives through the snowstorm to Wyoming, and Blackfeet territory: Nittowsinan, in time for the anniversary of the Marias Massacre. Etsy finally reads the unopened letter. It’s the confession Arthur wrote, but never sent. In it, he admits that he persuaded the scout Joe Cobell to start shooting at Heavy Runner’s camp, making Arthur ultimately responsible for the slaughter. Etsy manages to “kill” Arthur with a nail gun, cable saw, and ignited spray foam. Burning, his body plummets off the bluff from which soldiers shot Heavy Runner’s people. She throws his prairie dog head after it. Blackfeet riders have come to memorialize the massacre, Good Stab among them. Etsy wishes she could tell him how she stopped at Ackerman’s library earlier and destroyed Arthur’s original journal by pouring her father’s alkaline cremains over its acidic pages. Instead she raises a fist over her head in farewell to Arthur’s tormentor/confessor. He doesn’t return the salute. As he rides off after the other Blackfeet, Etsy sees a yellow hard hat hanging from his saddle. So he was the workman who found Arthur’s journal. The snowstorm swallows Good Stab. The nachzehrer’s gone—no, not the vampire. The Blackfeet. Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: All Arthur’s fussing about gluttony has been because of what he did once in hunger. This doesn’t stop him, as a prairie dog, from chewing on Etsy’s couch like a poorly trained puppy. What’s Cyclopean: The word of the day is “catachresis,” which is using an almost-right word—“mitigate” for “militate,” for example, or “Bouquet” for “Beaucarne.” The Degenerate Dutch: “I give myself permission… It’s what we white folk do.” Libronomicon: Among Etsy’s father’s few remaining possessions is a set of Zane Grey westerns. And an extremely awkward Bible being used as a file cabinet. Weirdbuilding: Etsy is deeply disappointed that her tresayle’s journal doesn’t reveal his fate. She was hoping, I suppose, for a revelatory “The window! The window!” Madness Takes Its Toll: Commit a description of vampiric giant prairie dogs to paper, and it may get you committed. Call 911 without any real explanation, and you’re hysterical, also in both senses of the word. Anne’s Commentary I had a feeling Good Stab might not kill Arthur outright, thus putting him beyond Good Stab’s not-so-tender mercies. The alternative, I figured, would be to make Arthur a nachzehrer, thus able to suffer for much if not all eternity on this earth, just in case the Christian Hell is a myth. Arthur doesn’t seem to have considered this possibility. Otherwise, he might have more strongly considered ruining Good Stab’s fun by committing suicide. Although I believe suicide is a mortal sin. Making it a bad choice if the Christian Hell is NOT a myth. Plus it’s a common superstition that suicides may become vampires, in which case Arthur would end up undead no matter what. Etsy Beaucarne has been whirling about in one of the lower circles of academic hell for a while, the one in which its victims are bedeviled by the dreaded tenure-and-promotions committee. Maybe she could take comfort in the thought that the committee’s Francophile member doesn’t know so much about French genealogical terms as she thinks she does. That, or I’ve messed up my reconstruction of Etsy’s reconstruction of her ancestral line. Here’s what I’ve got: Etsy Beaucarne, herself Etsy’s Dad, father Artemis (Flowers) Beaucarne, grandfather Arthur Flowers, great-grandfather Benjamin Flowers, great-great-grandfather Arthur Beaucarne, great-great-great grandfather Francophile Prof writes in her deleted but not lost comment that “Dr. E” might use the term “tresayle” instead of “great-great-great-grandfather” in referring to Arthur. Wiktionary gives this etymology for tresayle: “From Middle French trisayeul, from Latin tris, tres (“three”) + French aïeul (“grandfather”).” It defines the word as “a grandfather’s grandfather,” hence “a great-great-grandfather.” Not a “great-great-great-grandfather.” Etsy’s tresayle would then be Benjamin Flowers rather than Arthur Beaucarne. It looks like, in addition to the two greats in great-great-grandfather, you have to count the grand. That way you literally get three (tres) grandfathers (ayles.) The term for a great-great-great-grandfather is quatrayle, or the “grandfather of the grandfather of one’s father.” Four (quatr) grandfathers (ayles) would require three greats and a grand, or great-great-great-grandfather. Arthur Beaucarne, you old quatrayle, you. If you didn’t want all those descendants, you should have let Ada Murray use her “pessary,” an early twentieth century term for diaphragms and cervical caps. Instead you gave her some claptrap about how your “intended vocation” meant you couldn’t give her an STD, or presumably, a baby. What, were all Lutheran pastors-to-be fitted with male chastity belts, aka “penis cages.” Do an image-search on those beauties, hackers. Enough fun with words and on to everyone’s favorite mammalian order, the Rodentia. Or at least Goddess’s favorite mammalian order, if you go by number of species. Good Stab talked about putting himself through self-annihilation by eating so many “dirty faces” that he became a giant mouse himself. Either he never tried that undeath-style change, or he gave up and kept his Blackfeet form. Instead it’s Arthur who undergoes drastic rodentification, not to a giant mouse but to a giant prairie dog. Why a prairie dog? A black-tailed prairie dog, I conjecture, as it’s the more abundant species in Montana, with a more northern range than the white-tailed prairie dog. A keystone species, the prairie dog is a highly social animal, both on the “town” (colony) and the family levels. They have developed complex vocal communications, including an array of warning barks. A lone prairie dog would be an anxious and unhappy prairie dog. I’m assuming that Prairie Dog Arthur (PD-Arthur) would have been largely a solitary beast, interacting with other PDs only by dining on them. The more PD-like he became, the greater his torture would be, to long for his “natural” society while being forced to cannibalize on its members. That would be an emotional torture akin to what Good Stab has endured, an outcast forced to feed on Blackfeet in order to remain Blackfeet. See how you like it, Three-Persons, might have been his vengeful taunt. As a human who had largely isolated himself from his fellows, Arthur would probably have accepted this punishment as just, perhaps a Purgatorial trial. Perhaps volunteered to some degree. His only path back to a human form, a fully human mentality, would be to do as Good Stab does and feed on his former kind. In Blackfeet mythology, prairie dogs may be clever tricksters, as well as paragons of family and community. They feature in many stories about Good Stab’s friend, Napi. In spite of its title, “Bobcat and Birch Tree” has much to tell about a game in which the prairie dogs ultimately demonstrate their fellowship, while Napi is, well, ultimately Napi, charming but ever-hungry. Ultimately, Graham Jones’ novel has been for me a beautiful, stunning, harrowing ride. The ending is going to have to sit with me a while before I know what to make of it, but that’s fine. That’s the way of the best books. Ruthanna’s Commentary Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about. Last round I admitted my preference for weird bloody guts over mimetic ones. And here we are, with Etsy killing her giant prairie dog vampire tresayle with the fruits of a hardware store run, in the middle of a blizzard. Leading a giant prairie dog into the back of a clunker, trying to explain the whole thing to an unsympathetic property manager, dragging along a cat because she really does take after Arthur. That’s the stuff. Etsy is having a bad time of everything, even before the journal shows up. Her father’s dying, her career is dying, and her father would be horrified if he woke up long enough to find out about her career. The idea of creating a monograph from the journal is a wild hail Mary pass – she’s a communication studies prof, not an historian. It’s not her field. It’s just there. It’s the way academia doesn’t care about Life Happening, or the context from which you come, but is full of prejudicial practices that it doesn’t acknowledge because it couldn’t possibly have context and human limitations. (I once got a year added to my tenure clock for my wife’s medically complex pregnancy, then criticized for not using that year to work up extra publications.) So it’s no surprise that the journal drives her over the edge. She was expecting nice everyday history, admirable vocabulary, something to exploit and explain, and instead she gets this. There’s maybe a communications monograph to be gotten out of it – could it be treated as a parable? Lutheran pastor creates a fictional vampire story to illustrate how people engage with sin and (lack of) forgiveness? But she believes Arthur’s confession/absolution, if nothing else, and is in just the right (wrong) place to make his guilt her own. And, after all, the guilt for America’s genocidal campaigns against native nations is collective. She’s living on stolen land, that her ancestors helped to steal. (Why does Arthur label his own sections “absolution” and Good Stab’s “confession”? Is Good Stab not seeking absolution for his own guilt? Is Arthur not, reluctantly, confessing?) And finally, in Arthur’s last letter, Good Stab forcibly shares that ancestor’s very specific role in the theft. He was not another soldier caught up in diffusion of responsibility. He was studying to be a priest, riding along to study sin as if it were a spectator sport, and instead incited the sin with his own silver preacher’s tongue. He was hungry, drunk, frozen, desperate to return to the land of rations. He didn’t care whether they were at “the right camp,” and whispered murder in the ear of the one guy who might have cared. Thus his guilt at indulging in his parishioner’s food, not so much a distraction from his real sin as a symptom of it. He has murdered for gluttony before. Good Stab, then, turns Arthur into a fellow nachzehrer. Like his “mentor” Cat Man, he then feeds his victim into a punishing shape. In the process, it seems, he learns that eating mice wouldn’t end his own human suffering, but would simply turn him into a giant rodent. (Which means Cat Man is still out there somewhere as a miserable fish, hoping to get a bite of fisherman.) Perhaps that’s why, a century later, Good Stab’s still in fully human form, and has found ways to join with other Blackfeet in their ceremonies. Is he growing comfortable with his new nature, or—his vengeance done—will he now seek animalistic semi-oblivion? And how long will it take Arthur to grow back? His head is still down in that ravine, snapping. So nothing is really over—not the theft of land and life, not any of the three bloodsuckers, and not Etsy’s need to deal with the fallout of the past month. There’s no easy wrap-up. Just the continuing tangle of sin, and guilt, and confession, and inadequate absolution. Next week, we fail at tourism in Nadia Bulkin’s “Things to Know Before You Go.” You can find it in Silk and Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora. Then join us as we begin our new longread: H. G. Wells’s classic The Island of Dr. Moreau.[end-mark] The post ROUSes Abound: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 12) appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays The Odyssey The Eyes of Athena and the Disenchanted World of The Odyssey Are you defying the gods, or betraying them? By Leah Schnelbach | Published on July 22, 2026 Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon © Universal Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon © Universal Studios I’m not a Nolan bro. I liked Prestige and Dark Knight, hated Dark Knight Rises, thought Interstellar had some great elements but also some howlingly bad ones. I just rewatched Tenet in glorious 70mm, and I still don’t think it’s the masterpiece certain bros insist it is. My favorite of his films is actually Dunkirk, where I think his obsession with time works beautifully. It was brilliant to tell the story through the soldiers’ subjective experience of time, and break it into how long it will take different vehicles to get them off that fucking beach. And then there’s Oppenheimer, which in my mind is a wholly separate thing. It isn’t even a movie, it’s a thing I experience. The summer it came out, my life divided into “I am currently watching Oppenheimer, and I feel OK” and “I feel anxious because I’m not watching Oppenheimer right now”—I’ll admit that this was maybe a strange response. But it was also so obviously a culmination of Christopher Nolan’s Whole Thing that I was shocked to hear he was making another movie so soon after it, and even more shocked that it was an adaptation of The Odyssey. I’ve been skeptical of this film for months. I really didn’t see how it was going to work. But now that I’ve seen it, I think it is a perfect follow-up to Oppenheimer, both in structure and in spirit, and I love it. I’ll talk a bit about why in non-spoiler ways, and then I’ll dig into the thematic stuff below, with the usual warning. First let’s get he bad stuff out of the way. Nolan has taken a timeless story and chosen to emphasize elements that make it extremely timely. Personally, this was my favorite thing about it, but I know people who feel like he sucked a lot of the life and nuance out of it, and I see their point. One thing he did suck right out of it was color. I remain convinced that Nolan has an undiagnosed eye condition that only allows him to see steel grey and ice blue, and he genuinely doesn’t know that a lot of the rest of us see, like, purple, and forest green, and a whole plethora of pinks. In a movie like Tenet this is fine, but when you’re filming in the Mediterranean I want a wine dark sea and a goddamn rosy-fingered dawn, not roughly the same color scheme I can find in an industrial office park. Everyone says “Zeus’ Law” wayyyy too often. I’m glad he made it the heart of the story, I thought it was a perfect choice, but by the end I was expecting Nolan to come out dressed as a bard and yell it into the camera like the ending of Killers of the Flower Moon or something. …annnnd, that’s it. I’ve seen the film twice now, once on 70mm and once on 35mm (I haven’t managed to score an IMAX ticket yet) and I think it’s brilliant, it made me cry, it was even better the second time. Both times (one was a 10:30am screening, the other 8pm on a Sunday) the audience was absolutely silent and focused for the whole three hours. Both times a number of people stayed through the credits, both times people gathered in front of the theater to talk about what they’d just seen. Which, about that: I think it’s safe to say that I’ve been in a state of despair for a while now. I try not to be, but the despair waits for me, under my conscious thought, my busy life, my stacks of books, and afternoons out at bars watching World Cup games. I would never go so far as to say that Christopher Nolan healed this—I can feel Charybdis below and Scylla above—but it is helpful to me to see people standing on a Brooklyn sidewalk at midnight, waving their arms around and interrupting each other to discuss a 3,000-year-old story with the same passion I imagine people had when they heard it sung during a feast, or read from the commentaries in the Library of Alexandria. For anyone reading this who hasn’t seen it yet: GO SEE IT. As big as possible, IMAX if possible. Christopher Nolan has taken a very old story and used it to meditate on time, to look at what happens to a society that prizes war over peace, that refuses to welcome strangers, that distrusts anyone from outside its borders, that treats women and children as objects to be used. He does this with a cast designed in a lab to piss certain people off, and some extremely on-the-nose dialogue that may have been designed to piss certain other people off—but I think he’s made this movie for the generation of young people who are growing up in a toxic world, who need to be told that another world is possible, and he knows he needs to tell them that repeatedly, clearly, and in language that cannot be misunderstood. So yeah, they say Zeus’ Law too many times, and I think it’s kind of stupid, but also this movie isn’t for me, not in that way. The acting is uniformly excellent, though my favorite might be Elliot Page as Sinon. Sinon is kind of the best example of how Nolan has adapted the story; he takes a character who appears in Virgil’s Aeneid, not Homer’s Odyssey, and uses him to look at cowardice, honor, sacrifice, Odysseus’ willingness to lie and use his men like chess pieces, the terrible guilt he feels for doing that—and all of that comes through in Page and Damon’s scenes together. I’ve heard a few people ding Jon Benrthal for playing Menelaus like a small-time Outer Boroughs mob boss, but I actually enjoyed that. It was nice to see Tom Holland with a real character to chew on again. I would say that Nolan, maybe, brings too much of Penelope’s subtext to the surface, but also Anne Hathaway’s performance is amazing. John Leguizamo is perfect, Himesh Patel is perfect, Robert “plate-licker” Pattinson scoffed at mere perfection and created an all-time classic conniving villain. Samantha Morton is transcendent. And Matt Damon gives a nuanced portrait of grief and regret; Nolan’s Odysseus might not be enough of a trickster, and it would have been nice to see Damon play that as well, but he brings this version of Odysseus to life beautifully. The effects are giant and over-the-top, though I do wish the monsters were weirder. (That said, it’s worth seeing the film in the theater for both the Cyclops and Circe sequences, and I add my voice to all the people asking for a Christopher Nolan horror movie.) Ludwig Goransson’s score has been in my head for four days now, and I am very, very happy about that. And really, it’s worth noting that this is a big movie, overstuffed with ideas, full of action and adventure and straight-up horror, with a giant cast, that’s actually about something. If you have even the slightest interest in the film, you should see it in a theater full of people. But to get into thematic stuff I will need to spoil things from here on down, so board your ships and undertake a perilous voyage to the movie theater before reading on. Leaving aside questions of objective reality, what are gods for? Are they meant to frighten us into obedience, promise reward, inspire us to acts of kindness and generosity? Are they a comforting lie? Are they load-bearing pillars in society, or a pretty facade of order that hides chaos beneath? In Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, Odysseus uses Athena, and damns himself and his society in a way that transcends any dogma. Aside from anything else that happens in the film, the question of whether the Athena that appears to him is real or a figment, if the girl slaughtered at the altar was a priestess who then haunts him, or if Odysseus imagined that murder as a statue was decapitated, or it was Athena, coming to earth to be sacrificed in front of him, to make a point—Nolan leaves all of that up to our interpretation. Only Odysseus sees Athena intermittently, over the ten-year voyage home. Usually she’s glaring at him, standing in judgement or pity. We know that he prays to her, both during the voyage and during his long time with Calypso. When he tells Telemachus not to look for gods in men, that could be a life lesson for a very young man, or it could be that his own experience of seeing his goddess murdered, whether it was literal or metaphorical, has hurt him in ways he doesn’t even understand yet. But none of that matters. What matters is that Odysseus, who believes in Athena, who wears his wife’s pin as a talisman both of home and of the goddess’s protection, uses other people’s reverence for her to enact terrible violence on the innocent. And the film encourages us to root for him to do this. This is where the film becomes a true companion to Oppenheimer. In Oppenheimer, the Trinity Test is the center of the film. It’s the crux, and all the other action revolves around it. This is The Great Man, working on his Great Project, the Weapon That Will Win The War, the Miracle That Will Save Us From The Nazis. The Ark, the Grail, Captain America, The One Ring. When the Trinity Test happens, everything in the film, the action, the editing, the score, all tell us that we’re supposed to pull for this thing to work. The film uses all of the tricks and language of cinema to get us to to root for our own destruction. Because the bomb wasn’t a miracle, it was our doom. It was immediate death for thousands of people, slow torture for thousands of others, and probable extinction, eventually, for the rest of us.   The rest of the film teases all the threads apart to get us to question its creation, Oppenheimer’s morality, the United States’ choice to use the bomb at all, the subsequent proliferation of weapons that can end the world. And while the film only touches on it glancingly, I find it interesting that when Oppenheimer talks about it he invokes Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita, and names the test itself after “Batter my heart, three-person’d God”, one of John Donne’s most God-besotted poems. (Which is saying something!) In dealing with this unspeakable thing, even the secular Jewish kinda sorta Marxist reaches toward religion and stories of gods to try to express the terror and awe of the bomb. The Odyssey opens with the Bard (the fabulous Travis Scott) singing the song of the Trojan Horse. Even in this version, presumably embroidered over a decade of retellings, we hear that the horse is an offering for Athena specifically. The Trojans accept it and bring it into their city, in order to respect their foes and honor the goddess. Later the movie shows us the Horse from the inside, in Menelaus’ telling. Just as in Oppenheimer’s Trinity test, 135 years of movie magic conspire to make us want the gambit to work. We’re with the men inside the horse. We see some of them drown when the tides wash in, we’re with the men as they’re covered in each others’ shit and piss and trapped in a coffin with the rotting bodies of their companions. As Menelaus tells the story to Telemachus, as one of the men who risked everything to be part of this mission, we want them to succeed. We want the Trojans to bring the horse in. We want Odysseus and his men to get the gate open. The camera closes in on each torturous turn of the gears, each arrow that sails from the bows of the Trojan guards. When the gates open, and Agammemnon stands in his overpowering armor, and the Greeks around him scream in triumph, it feels like a victory. We cut back to Telemachus openly weeping at this story that he’s heard as a fable but now hears from the mouth of one of his father’s best friends, a man who was there and suffered with him. But by the time we come back to the story of the horse at the end, we know that a moment that looked like victory was never so simple. Agammemnon murdered his child, was murdered in turn by his wife, who was murdered, in her turn, by her own son. We’ve heard Sinon’s account of his death, seen Odysseus pressed against the belly of the horse, listening to the young man’s last breaths just outside. We know that none of Odysseus’ men made it home. And worse: everywhere they went, they brought death with them, whether because of a god’s curse or their own actions, until, a decade on, they are whispered of as the People From The Sea and used as proof that civilization is collapsing.   And then to hear the story from Odysseus’ own mouth—it isn’t just the story of a trick that gets them inside the walls. Odysseus doesn’t even talk about the days inside the horse, he skips straight to the fight for the gate. And it isn’t his first-hand account of the horrors of war—we don’t see much of it, actually. We see fire, we hear screaming, but there is very little gore compared to most war stories. The true horror is in his knowledge that he used the Trojans’ reverence for Athena against them, and destroyed a kind of trust between people that can never be restored. In this “time of apparent magic” it was Odysseus who took the magic out of the world, in a way—does it matter whether the gods are real, if any offering made to them could be a murderous trick? Do his prayers to Athena mean anything, after he used her like that? The betrayal, the possible murder of a priestess, the definite desecration of a temple, we don’t see it until the last half hour of the movie, we just see the aftermath of those acts, spreading like radiation through every event in the film. Much in the way Nolan uses silence in the Trinity test, rather than asking Ludwig Goransson to compose a song for the Sirens, he puts us in the point-of-view of Odysseus’ right hand, Eurylochus, who only sees the effect of the song as his friend screams and writhes against the mast—and Odysseus later tells him that the Sirens sang of the world he helped destroy. We hear talk of the Sea People constantly. We see how the generation after Odysseus exploits Zeus’ Law, we see how Telemachus, a good young man, desperately searches for Athena in the eyes of everyone he meets—and he nearly dies because evil men are only too willing to impersonate priests of Athena. Mentor dies because he trusts the drink the “priests” hand him, and the only reason Telemachus lives is that his father is there to protect him. But how is their trick any different than his—other than the fact that it would only have killed a few people, and doomed Penelope to a marriage she didn’t want? How does that treachery stand against what was done in Troy? When Odysseus finally tells Penelope about the sack of Troy, he isn’t just telling her. He’s telling Athena, sitting in silence beside him. He reaches out to her and she hold his hand for a moment, but after we see the murder of the girl, and the beheading of the statue, when it cuts back all Odysseus holds in his hand is air. Maybe because she was never “real”? Maybe because, in betraying her, he has made himself unworthy of her presence?   What I love is that even after this, Odysseus fights to hold on to his values. It’s the fight with the suitors that allows us as an audience to lose ourselves in an action sequence, because this time Odysseus’ cause is entirely just. He murders the suitors, knowing it means his exile but also knowing that he didn’t intend to stay in Ithaca anyway. He protects his son’s honor, and avenges his wife. We see that throughout the fight, some of the suitors kneel and bow to Odysseus, showing that they’ve accepted him as the true master of the house and want the chaos to end. With Telemachus free of his unwanted guests’ blood, he’s free to rule Ithaca as a good-hearted young king who has behaved honorably at every turn. And finally Odysseus and Penelope go west to honor the fallen, just as he’s promised to do throughout the film. Society might be crumbling around them, but they refuse to give up on it, and every tiny action they take is one more step toward restoring the trust humanity needs to survive. I may have mentioned this on this website before, but a number of years ago I attended a panel designed to help non-profits apply for grants. At one point the person leading the panel referred to the “Culture Wars” as a thing of the past, a thing he and the other panelists had apparently won. I remember the jolt I felt when he said that, I remember coughing so I didn’t laugh out loud. I wish I had ever lived in the world he lived in. It must be so nice there. A small (very small, very vanishingly small, but SO LOUD) army of people are now trying to say this movie isn’t successful. They’re making shit up online to convince their echo chamber that it flopped, that Nolan’s career is screwed, that going “woke” equals going broke. They spent months yelling about casting choices and their own stupid interpretations of Greek myth and culture, and now they’re in a panic spiral because, once again, most of us have taken the side of interesting art rather than bigotry and they can’t handle the idea that reality doesn’t match what they see on their screens. They’re wrong. They’re always wrong, about everything. But it doesn’t matter, because some of them have power at the moment. We live in a time of magic and rumor, of wars across the sea and Sea People who try to escape those wars so their children have at least a (very small, very vanishingly small) chance at life—and are hated and condemned for it. A time when the story a few rich people tells each other shapes the reality the rest of us have to live in. Christopher Nolan took a story of war and magic and monsters and homecoming, and he turned it into a story where civilization collapses when people fail to welcome the stranger. He took a story where people honor strangers lest they entertain the gods in disguise, and gently suggests that perhaps every person is worthy of welcome and guest-friendship. He took a story where the gods manipulate everything people do, and gently suggests that people should take some fucking responsibility for their own actions, and along the way shows us what happens when someone betrays the god he claims to worship. He did it with practical effects, human actors, human musicians using ancient instruments, human hands teaching actors how to fight, how to row, how to sail. I am still not a Nolan bro, but if he ever comes to my door I’ll throw him a fucking feast, no questions asked. [end-mark] The post The Eyes of Athena and the Disenchanted World of <em>The Odyssey</em> appeared first on Reactor.

News Clayface It’s Hard for a Thespian on the Mean Streets of Gotham in the Trailer for Clayface This time, it’s no pottery accident By Molly Templeton | Published on July 22, 2026 Screenshot: DC Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: DC Studios Like the teaser that came before it, the new trailer for Clayface uses an eerie version of The Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??” which, if you are somehow unfamiliar, has lyrics that ask “Do you realize / that you have the most beautiful face?” Ha, ha, get it? Because this is a movie about Clayface? Who was an actor with a pretty face before he got sliced up by some local toughs? It’s not clear exactly why Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) draws the ire of a “local crime boss,” or why he seemingly easily finds his way to an experimental treatment that should bring his pretty face back. Even Naomi Ackie, whose character administers said treatment, seems a little worried about it. And we all know how well said treatment works out! As this trailer goes on, Matt gets, well, gooier and gooier. And then he learns to control the gooification. Here’s how the synopsis puts it: Matt Hagen’s meteoric rise from Gotham street kid to Hollywood leading man is tragically cut short when a local crime boss’s actions leave him horribly disfigured. Abandoned by his team and with nothing left, Matt seeks out a cutting-edge treatment that miraculously returns him to his former self… but also unexpectedly affects his grip on reality, spiraling him down a destructive path of all-consuming revenge. This is a Very Serious Body Horror version of Clayface, as brought to you by writers Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini and director James Watkins (Speak No Evil). This Clayface is not having fun turning himself into Billy Bob Thornton. This Clayface is not having any fun at all. If you would like Fun Clayface, you have Harley Quinn. For everyone else, there’s movie Clayface, which will be in theaters October 23.[end-mark] The post It’s Hard for a Thespian on the Mean Streets of Gotham in the Trailer for <i>Clayface</i> appeared first on Reactor.