Books Reading the Weird If NOT CAT Then NOT VAMPIRE: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 4) By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on April 1, 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 cover Chapters 7-8 of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! The Absolution of Three-Persons—April 11, 1912: It’s been four days since Good Stab stabbed Arthur Beaucarne “to the quick” with his tale. The pastor has spent this time dissecting the Blackfeet’s story, studying each piece, then trying to “puzzle them all together again into a narrative [he] can begin to accept.” Arthur’s “provisional conjecture” discounts “the more fantastic elements.” Perhaps Good Stab suffered some “catastrophic loss” related to the Marias River massacre which forced him to winter alone in the wilderness. This isolation and privation could have brought on delusions that, to Good Stab, rendered “the impossible… unassailable fact.” Arthur catalogs the delusions. Good Stab was infected with a curse by a “Cat Man.” He’d henceforth subsist by drinking blood, enabled by senses beyond both human and animal ken. He’d be resilient to disease, accidental injuries, and intentional attacks, healing quickly from lesser wounds, dying only temporarily from mortal ones. Monstrous gluttony forced him to drain each victim to the last drop of living blood; if he persisted past the victim’s last heartbeat, the remaining blood would sicken him. The way that Good Stab gradually takes on “four-foot” characteristics if he eats animals reminds Arthur of “some ancient lay… complete with justice and chivalry,” of which he’s forgotten the details. On the liability side, Good Stab claims to be hypersensitive to sunlight, and can ingest no solid foods or liquids apart from blood. Another liability, Arthur considers not necessarily supernatural or evil. Good Stab deplores succumbing to deep torpor after feeding. Some mortals, including Arthur, find “extreme satiation” a welcome numbing of thought, allowing for “communion with Creation that speaks ineluctably of wholeness.” Not that Arthur doesn’t regret it when he stumbles drunkenly around the church blubbering apologies to the crucified Jesus, or when he stuffs himself with parishioner-donated food until he’s ill. The first Sunday, Arthur observed that dogs dislike Good Stab. This last Sunday, he observed something more troubling. Instead of swallowing the Host, Good Stab must have hidden it in his sleeve, because later he dropped it in the street. Whether he did this in disrespect for the white man’s religion or because the Host was solid food doesn’t matter—the sacrilege is Arthur’s fault. He should never have let someone not of the Faith participate in communion. On Tuesday, the first murdered man is buried. Arthur struggles through the aftermath of a food binge to officiate at the funeral. Twenty townspeople attend, drawn by curiosity rather than grief. Good Stab is not there, but another stranger is: a neatly dressed and shaven man holding a bowler hat. He departs with Sheriff Doyle after a nod to Arthur. As penance for his latest gluttony, Arthur remains while the gravediggers finish their work. From the top of the town “boot hill,” he looks out across the prairie. He imagines how Good Stab must have crossed it the night he walked into Miles City, and he wishes he could have seen his approach—and “scurried away.” April 13, 1912: Arthur learns from the boarding house porch-sitters that there’s a Blackfeet man living on the outskirts of town. He buys a thick rasher of bacon, that universally-desirable food, and visits a dingy tent before which the aged Amos Short Ribs huddles over a dung fire. The bacon accepted and cooking, Arthur tries to learn whether Amos has ever seen a domestic cat—one small doubt he has about Good Stab’s story is that back in 1870, a Blackfeet shouldn’t have known what a such a feline was, much less name his monster Cat Man. Getting nowhere with mere descriptions, the embarrassed but desperate Arthur borrows the brothel’s orange mouser. Amos’ reverent fascination with the animal proves it is new to him. As Arthur’s about to depart, Amos asks after “the Fullblood” he’s seen exiting the church. Amos had thought the man dead, killed for what he did to the buffalo hunters. Asked just what the Fullblood did, Amos points with lips and chin to the prairie. Thinking of the flayed corpses found near town, Arthur asks if the Fullblood is the one painting— But Amos suddenly disappears into his tent. The stranger from the funeral walks up. He introduces himself as Dove. Just Dove. He’s come by coach from San Francisco, and he produces credentials naming him a Pinkerton of the famous detective agency. Arthur may be able to help him with his current case. A San Francisco family has set him on the trail of… he can’t say what. But various clues have led him to believe “they” are now in or around Miles City. Dove then looks Arthur in the eye, watching for his reaction, and adds: “Parts of them anyway, Father. I can’t say for certain where their skin is.” The Degenerate Dutch: Beaucarne is continually surprised by Native Americans being “rhetorically capable,” or indeed speaking English. Madness Takes Its Toll: Obviously Good Stab became delusional while lost in the wilderness, confusing his hallucinations with what he actually did for survival. Something something narratives, something something cats. Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: The main metric that Beaucarne tracks is his own sins, with a preference for those falling into easy categories over the ones he’d prefer not to think about. This week there’s gluttony (drunkenness and binge-eating), despair (subsequent to the drinking), and vanity (looking at his teeth in a mirror). Ruthanna’s Commentary Motivated reasoning, it preys upon the mind—The more you think things through with it, the less of truth you’ll find!You lay out all your logic with conclusions picked already,And if you logic vampires you’ll surely end up deady.It works like this: he’s heard of cats, and therefore it’s a lie.These savage people have no pets, and thus you question whyGood Stab would make confession with a Cat Man at the heart;If no cats then no bloodsuckers, quod erat, you’re so smart!Methinks you doth protest so much, like gnomes with underpants:You have step one, you have step three; you have no evidenceTo fill that middle question-mark and get what you desire.Good Stab knows what you won’t admit—it’s your own pants on fire. Sorry, this is what happens when our whole weekly reading involves Arthur Beaucarne trying to disprove scary stories. We still don’t know why Good Stab’s story is so scary to him, except that it clearly has something to do with skinned buffalo, and skinned buffalo hunters, and old sins that Beaucarne doesn’t want to think about. So instead he’s borrowing cats from the local cathouse. And misquoting Shakespeare so as to emphasize the unbridgeable barrier between civilized White Man and savage. To contrast with Beaucarne’s amateur investigation, a Pinkerton shows up. During the U.S. Civil War, the Pinkerton Agency did espionage work for the Union; by this time they’re both the largest private law enforcement agency in the world and primarily known for strikebreaking. They also did a certain amount of tracking western outlaws, so it makes sense that they would be on the trail of a serial killer in Miles City. Ruthless, competent, and eager to support the status quo, they may be a problem for Good Stab. And if they know more about the situation than the reader, they may be a problem for Beaucarne as well. Meanwhile, Chance Aubrey is hanging around the telegraph office, obsessing over the Titanic. That’s not symbolic at all. Beaucarne considers it “hubris for the creations of men,” though he manages to avoid preaching over sausages. Hubris is, of course, a very civilized sin. Beaucarne values hard work to get the most (by European definitions) from what G-d has given you. Avoid exploiting land until you’ve extracted all possible resources, and you don’t deserve to keep it at all. Railroads and telegraphs prove Manifest Destiny. So where’s the line? Is it just how much you invoke G-d in your excitement? It’s Kipling-ish, this confidence in one’s own cultural superiority bolstered by a purely religious humility that requires no mortal-world questioning of assumptions: If, drunk with sight of power, we loose   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,Such boastings as the Gentiles use,   Or lesser breeds without the Law—Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,Lest we forget—lest we forget! Respect the divine, kneel in church, and doubt any word from the “lesser breeds”—what else do you need to stay ahead in life? Beaucarne, I hope, is soon to find out. Anne’s Commentary If weird narrative has a core feature, a hard-beating heart, it’s the protagonistic impulse to explain away the inexplicable until compelled to acknowledge its existence. After struggles protracted or sharp, characters have to reconfigure their worldview to include the new aspect of reality, whether they thereafter accept it, flee it, or fight to drive it out of their immediate breathing space, their minute acre of the universe. In Old West parlance, they could tell the Weird this town ain’t big enough for the two of us, so git or draw. Problem with the latter alternative is that the Weird’s generally packing the bigger gun and quicker trigger appendage. In this week’s chapter, Graham Jones does a superb job of harrying Arthur Beaucarne through the incredulous phase. Arthur takes a firmly rational approach to Good Stab’s confession. His “provisional conjecture” is that the fantastic elements of his story are just that, fantastical. He’s generous enough to provisionally entertain the possibility that, rather than perpetrating deliberate fraud, Good Stab suffers from a posttraumatic delusion. Arthur can expose this by picking apart the confession and “[puzzling the pieces] back together again into a narrative [he] can begin to accept.” Arthur has little trouble constructing a situation dire enough to have overset Good Stab’s reason. Whether or not he was alive as far back as the Marias Massacre (unlikely), Major Baker’s actions against the Blackfeet could have personally injured Good Stab. When forced for whatever reason to spend a winter alone near the Massacre site, he might have confounded his trial with that of his forebears, weaving a tortuous story to explain how he, who looks too young for it, was actually an adult in 1870. One of the boarding house porchsitters might diagnose Good Stab as crazy like a loon. Arthur also allows he could be crazy like a fox, a boldly deceptive trickster out to con an old white man, or at least to torment him with a tale too closely paralleling the pastor’s guilty history. At the same time, Arthur recognizes he may be “arranging angels on the head of a pin” by concocting possible inconsistencies in Good Stab’s confession, as niggling as whether a Blackfoot would have known about domestic cats in 1870. That doesn’t stop him from hunting up a kitty to amaze old Amos Short Ribs. Arthur remembers a story similar to Good Stab’s about becoming what he eats, “some ancient lay or another I read, complete with justice and chivalry, but can no longer conjure the precise details of.” Naturally, I had to hunt for narratives about the consequences of overconsumption. It’s not surprisingly a common theme in world myth and folklore. As far as “ancient lays” go, there’s the Saga of Hrolf Kraki, which goes back at least to the 1400s in Iceland. In it, a prince is enchanted to walk by day as a bear. When the bear-prince is killed, his pregnant lover is forced to eat his flesh. She subsequently delivers one son with elk features, another with dog features, and a third who can shape-shift into a spirit-bear during battle. I think it’s more likely Arthur knew two other stories. The first concerns a character ironically similar to Arthur in his gluttony. Erysichthon of ancient Greek legend was a king so rapacious in his greed that he cut down a grove sacred to Demeter to build a magnificent banquet hall. The highly annoyed goddess cursed him with an insatiable hunger, to feed which he depleted his entire fortune and even sold his daughter, Mestra, into slavery. When his larder was at last empty, madness drove him to devour his own flesh until nothing remained of him. Arthur might have read a detailed account of this compulsive overeater in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VIII, Fable VII. Luckily, Arthur doesn’t have Erysichthon’s means and so can only stuff himself when parishioners bring edible offerings. He can food-obsess full-time, though, as when he brings old Amos bacon or wonders how Good Stab can be so intent on proving his monstrous nature that he doesn’t scarf down Arthur’s stew. The second story, widespread in Native American folklore from its Algonquian origins, pertains more to Good Stab’s condition. It’s the legend of the Wendigo, a ravenous spirit associated with harsh Northern winters during which people might be driven to cannibalism, the utmost expression of insatiable greed and antisocial selfishness. Such moral failure could doom cannibals to become the monstrous incarnations of what they ate: emaciated corpses often grown to gigantic proportions, emitting a foul stench, their hearts turned to ice. Good Stab is no Wendigo in that his transformation was not due to personal greed or gluttony, certainly not to cannibalism. He does, however, accuse himself of moral failure in his killing of the beaver patriarch, all so he could have enough pelts to buy a new rifle. And now a stranger has ridden the stage coach into town to complicate Arthur’s life, and thicken the “hump” murders subplot. Welcome to Miles City, Pinkerton man Dove, and watch your well-clad back. Weird business is afoot here. Next week, we celebrate National Poetry Month by exploring Stoker Award nominees, starting with a set of Maxwell Gold’s cosmic horror poems on The Horror Zine.[end-mark] The post If NOT CAT Then NOT VAMPIRE: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 4) appeared first on Reactor.

Column 80s Fantasy Film Club The Last Unicorn: A Fantasy Classic Whose Beauty Never Fades Beyond simple nostalgia, this movie was a foundational part of so many childhoods… By Tyler Dean | Published on April 1, 2026 Credit: Rankin/Bass Productions Comment 1 Share New Share Credit: Rankin/Bass Productions In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the Eighties are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since. For a more in-depth introduction to this series of articles, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. Last time we looked at Rankin/Bass’ chimeric cult classic of magic and science, The Flight of Dragons; this time we are looking at another (far more sublime) clash between the ancient and modern, The Last Unicorn. Like most millennials, I saw The Last Unicorn on a rented VHS sometime in my early childhood. I wouldn’t read Peter Beagle’s original novel until college when it was recommended to me by my then-girlfriend, who adored it. By the time I was reading Beagle’s exquisite prose on a train headed from Parma to Ravenna, the cartoon was settled lore, a thing so deep in my DNA that I could not look at it quite right. It felt like a deep and foundational seam of my personality. And, judging by the responses to this film over the last forty years, it got into the bones of a whole generation. So, let’s discuss… Based on Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 novel, the 1982 film follows the same plot, more or less. The titular Unicorn, upon learning that she is the last of her kind, sets out to find her missing kin. Along the way, she finds allies in Schmendrick the Magician and the medieval equivalent of an aging gun moll, Molly Grue; eventually they arrive in the lands of King Haggard, who has trapped the other unicorns in the sea, where they are guarded by the menacing Red Bull. To protect her from the Red Bull, Schmendrick turns the Unicorn into a human woman. Disguised as the Lady Amalthea, the last Unicorn begins to forget that she was ever an immortal being and falls in love with Haggard’s ward, Prince Lír. Molly, Schmendrick, and Amalthea search for the location of the Red Bull and discover that it has driven all the other unicorns into the sea so that the melancholy Haggard can look upon them every day—they are the only thing that has ever made him happy, so he has hunted and hoarded them. Amalthea becomes a unicorn again and finally defeats the Bull in a desperate battle. The Unicorns are freed, Haggard and his castle tumble into the waves, and Lír bids a heartfelt farewell to the woman he loved. Molly Grue and Schmendrick ride off together into the sunset and the Unicorn returns to her woods, no longer the last of her kind, and having experienced love and regret during her time in a mortal body. The film was released in a small number of theatres, made a modest but disappointing profit and then went on to do what most Rankin/Bass productions did: finding a devoted audience on VHS and laserdisc.  So…is The Last Unicorn any good? Does its hallowed reputation live up to the hype conjured by our collective childhood nostalgia? Yes, for the most part! It’s far from a perfect film but it has more than enough charm, pathos, humor, and style to make up for its minor shortcomings.  Let’s talk about the bad first. The film does drag in the second half. For every incredible ten-minute vignette, there are long stretches where very little happens. There are several songs performed by the British-American rock band America that are fantastic—the soundtrack was composed and arranged by songwriting legend Jimmy Webb, and the eponymous title track is an absolute folk rock classic. There are another two songs, however—one sung by Katie Irving (performing for Mia Farrow), and a duet sung by Irving and Jeff Bridges—that are pretty terrible. Irving in particular sounds off-key, which is surprising given that she was ostensibly hired because Farrow herself could not sing. But honestly, that’s about the sum total of the movie’s shortcomings, and its high points far outweigh its weaknesses.  A lot of credit is due to Beagle’s writing. He adapted the screenplay from his novel and is surprisingly not precious about his own work. The original novel feels deeply postmodern, constantly self-analyzing and deconstructing its own fantasy tropes. His film adaptation is played straight, to its vast credit—trusting in the power of its own mythos and preserving enough of Beagle’s purposely anachronistic humor to entertain without ever veering into self-parody. So many of Rankin and Bass’ screenplays were written by the far less talented Romeo Muller (who scripted both The Flight of Dragons and The Return of the King), and the difference in quality is painfully apparent when compared with Beagle’s work. The cast is also phenomenal. Surprisingly stacked for a small release, it features Mia Farrow as the Unicorn, Alan Arkin as Schmendrick, Christopher Lee as Haggard, Jeff Bridgesas Lír, and Angela Lansbury as Mommy Fortuna. The real power player, however, is Tammy Grimes, who imbues Molly Grue with an energy both jaggedly tragic and pragmatically resigned. She is the emotional heart of the film and manages to be a standout even among an incredibly talented cast. Incidentally, Asa West’s incredible essay on the character (right here on Reactor!) says more about Molly Grue than I have space to in this essay and is well worth your time. Through a combination of Beagle’s writing and stellar performances from Grimes, Farrow, and Lee, the film never flinches away from being about eschatological grief and the impossibility of reclaiming a lost golden age. There is an elegiac sadness in Molly Grue and Haggard both that makes the characters feel uncomfortably close to one another, despite the fact that they choose entirely different strategies for coping with their grief. The film’s sorrowful bona fides are deeply felt, even if children drawn to the story might not fully comprehend those aspects until they’re a bit older. It’s also a beautiful film. While the animation itself is occasionally a bit clunky, the designs are gorgeous. Lester Abrams, who also was the lead character designer on Rankin/Bass’ The Hobbit (1977) and Return of the King (1983), gives his characters a charming, quirky strangeness reminiscent of Brian Froud and clearly inspired, at least in part, by Norwegian NyForm troll figurines. The landscapes have a stylish Mary Blair quality that feels both modern and classically fantastical. Some of its most breathtaking artistry comes at the very beginning, during the opening sequence in which animated versions of the Unicorn Tapestries appear over America’s haunting, hopeful theme song, setting a very high bar for the rest of the movie. Perhaps the movie’s best quality (for me personally at least): it’s genuinely scary. Though it only lasts about ten minutes, relatively early in the film, the sequence in which the Unicorn is a prisoner of Mommy Fortuna’s traveling carnival, put on display before disbelieving peasants, is a masterclass in acting. From the design of Celaeno the Harpy, equal parts monstrous and obscene, to Mommy Fortuna gleeful embracing her own death (having fulfilled her life’s purpose by trapping the immortal beast), the entire sequence is frightening effective in inspiring both abject fear of an immortal monster and good old fashioned existential dread. So, given how marvelous The Last Unicorn is, what are its lasting impacts? It obviously influenced a generation of fantasy fans and, like all the best entries in this column, helped to pave the way for the explosion of high fantasy content that we’d see in the 2000s. On some more specific notes, it seems absurd to assume that it did not contribute, in part, to the creation of the previously covered Legend (1985) and its unicorn-centric fairytale plot. Even the design of Tim Curry’s iconic look—huge and devilish in red makeup and prosthetics, sporting gigantic horns—feels like it may have taken some unconscious inspiration from the Red Bull.  Speaking of the Red Bull, while the Thai trucker elixir that became the internationally popular energy drink was called Krating Daeng (which translates, roughly to “Red Bull”), I personally refuse to believe that the choice to go with that direct translation didn’t have at least something to do with the fiery antagonist of this film (even if Haggard’s creature didn’t have wings). On a less specious note, the look of Haggard’s lonely, crumbling castle by the sea—hewn out of dark stone which sometimes takes on the appearance of tormented faces trapped in the rock—feels like it must have partly inspired George R.R. Martin’s descriptions of Dragonstone, a similarly lonely seaside castle covered in monstrous stone visages (the HBO shows radically changed the look of Dragonstone into something, in my opinion, far less interesting).  As we’ve discussed before, Topcraft, the studio that had animated The Hobbit, The Return of the King, The Flight of Dragons and other Rankin/Bass productions, would eventually be reborn as Studio Ghibli after a bankruptcy in 1985. You can absolutely see some of that iconic studio’s stylistic roots as they’re taking shape in The Last Unicorn. And some of those design sensibilities also feel like they were reflected back by popular culture over the next few years. The Unicorn’s smooth, doelike visage feels like a precursor to the distinctly unhorselike beasts of late ’80s megahit My Little Pony (based on an American toyline, but animated by Japanese and Korean studios). And there is something in her long-limbed grace (and beast-to-human transformation) that feels like it is paving the way for young audiences to adore Magical Girl anime series like Sailor Moon which hit American airwaves in the decade following.  But what do you think? Is The Last Unicorn as important a staple of your childhood as it was in mine? Do you have a lifelong fear of fortune tellers or a penchant for sexy trees as a result? Let me know in the comments, and be sure to join us next time as we pivot from a towering work of children’s animation to an iconic live-action film that contains at least one element that is decidedly not for children: 1986’s Labyrinth![end-mark] The post <i>The Last Unicorn</i>: A Fantasy Classic Whose Beauty Never Fades appeared first on Reactor.

Books book bans What to Know About the National Book Ban Bill House Resolution 7661 is a potentially significant piece of book ban legislation. Here’s what you need to know about it. By Matthew Byrd | Published on April 1, 2026 Photo by Michael Dziedzic [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Michael Dziedzic [via Unsplash] On March 19, the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce advanced H.R. 7661. There is no word regarding when the bill will be voted on, but the vote is expected to occur sometime in the coming weeks. While that bill number may not sound familiar, there’s a good chance you have recently heard it referred to as the National Book Ban Bill. Though that title is not formally associated with the proposed resolution, it does speak to the concerns many have regarding the bill’s language, intentions, and potential long-term impact. While it can understandably feel overwhelming to keep up with every potentially impactful piece of legislation in the modern United States government, the details of H. R. 7661 (including those not printed, which only exist between the lines) make it worth knowing about for anyone who opposes the growing trend of book bans and public education funding. What is H. R. 7661, or the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act? Formally, what is sometimes referred to as the National Book Ban Bill is being presented as H.R. 7661 or the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.” You can read that act here. It has also been referred to as the “National Don’t Say Gay bill,” a reference to a 2022 statute that triggered significant school policy changes, including legislation that restricted public schools from introducing material in kindergarten through 3rd-grade classrooms that was deemed to be related to matters of sexual orientation and gender identity. The law also included requirements specific to students in higher grades and age ranges. A sweeping initiative, the Don’t Say Gay bill (formally referred to as the “Parental Rights in Education” bill) established several education restrictions regarding both curricula and school policies that could be enforced via various means (including potential legal action). It required schools to inform parents if their children received any mental health services at school, it allowed parents to have greater access to formerly private documents related to their kids, and it enacted a series of moderation policies that effectively enabled legislators to have greater control over what is (and isn’t) taught to students in those age ranges via funding decisions and similar policies. Said policies included book bans, which are also at the heart of H.R. 7661’s many potential effects. The Main Provisions of H. R. 7661 The primary purpose of H. R. 7661 is to enable the U.S. government to deny federal funding to schools that use those funds for programs and materials the bill deems to be inappropriate. The bill is effectively an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The act was designed to provide expanded federal funding to public schools to ensure that their students (more specifically, public school students in lower-income areas) didn’t continue to fall far behind students at schools with access to more resources. It was a milestone piece of legislation that remains one of the cornerstones for federal public school funding in the United States to this day. While H. R. 7661 would not eliminate that act, it would, in the bill’s own language, “prohibit the use of funds provided under such Act to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, and for other purposes.” The broad nature of that language is one of the more controversial aspects of the bill. For instance, it would deny schools the ability to use federal funding for programs, literature, and related texts that include “sexually oriented material” and “material that exposes such children to nude adults, individuals who are stripping, or lewd or lascivious dancing.” H. R. 7661 also includes exemptions for scientific texts, works related to major religions, as well as “classic works of literature” and “classic works of art” (more on those in a bit) that may naturally include references to the content it intends to restrict. Furthermore, the authors of the bill note that “sexually oriented material” includes “any depiction, description, or simulation of sexually explicit conduct (as defined in subparagraphs (A) and (B) of section 2256(2) of title 18, United States Code).” You can read those United States Code subparagraphs here. They largely reference material such as “bestiality” and “sadistic or masochistic abuse” but also include the far more general idea of “sexual intercourse… whether between persons of the same or opposite sex” as sexually explicit content. It is a rather large collection of topics which could potentially fall under that umbrella definition. However, H. R. 7661 would expand the definition of “sexually oriented material” to include material that “involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism.” Along with suggesting that matters of identity should be considered a sexually obscene topic, the inclusion of that language has significant legal implications. That choice of wording makes it clear that this bill will most directly and immediately affect transgender students, transgender-related materials, and it could be argued, gender non-conformity topics in general, which may include discussions of specifically prohibited subjects in affected schools.  What’s important to remember is that the bill specifies works that will be excluded, but it is more vague regarding what, exactly, could be impacted. It could, for instance, be determined that a variety of LGBTQIA+ books that make passing reference (or even perceived passing references) to such materials could also be effectively banned from federally funded schools. The policies for such determinations and review procedures are not set. It should also be noted that the use of “sexually oriented material” and similar pieces of broad language have often been contested as the basis for similar pieces of legislation (more on those below).  There are undoubtedly concerns regarding the direct targeting of students and materials that would be most obviously impacted by the “gender dysphoria or transgenderism” language. The reason that this is being referred to as a “National Book Ban Bill,” though, is due to both the bill’s relationship with current federal funding policies (and thus its potential reach) and the ways that its language could be used to legally justify a variety of bans or create a precedent for similarly sweeping bills.  What Would Happen If H. R. 7661 Passes? Due to the potentially expansive nature of this bill and the ways its language could ultimately be interpreted, its full potential effects are difficult to predict. However, there are a few figures that capture the potential scope of this act and its effects.  The National Center for Educational Statistics states that 63 percent of traditional public schools and 62 percent of public charter schools were eligible for Title I funding as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act during the 2021-2022 school year. The exact number of schools that received said funding and how much funding they received can be difficult to track from year to year, given the scope of the program and the sometimes inconsistent reporting on a state-by-state level. Some estimates suggest that we’re looking at around 50,000 schools that regularly benefit from the program. The National Center for Educational Statistics estimates that there were 99,200 public schools in the United States as of the 2021-2022 school year. While some of those schools rely on more Title I funding than others, federal funding remains a vital part of many public schools’ operating budgets. And as other recent reports regarding Title I funding in public schools suggest, qualifying schools remain especially dependent on any level of federal funding at a time when other funding resources are drying up, and public schools are making cutbacks to essentials while battling a variety of state and local laws that impact their funding and operations.  All of this is to say that H. R. 7661 could potentially require nearly half of U.S. public schools to comply with these new laws or risk losing vital federal funds. To put it another way, this bill would not repeal the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, but it would play a significant role in determining whether the tens of thousands of schools and millions of students that the act was intended to help will continue to receive its intended benefits. What exactly compliance with H. R. 7661 will ultimately look like is very much up for debate. There is quite a bit of room for interpretation regarding the potential extent of its effects. But at a time when public schools are increasingly dependent on federal funding for not just closing the education gap but remaining operational, those schools would be heavily incentivized to comply by removing whatever is ultimately considered to be offensive programs and texts. In the future, the nature of their curricula and available materials would also be strongly dictated by compliance with this act. The Exemptions For “Art” and “Classics” in H. R. 7661 and Who Determines Them The aforementioned exemptions mentioned in H. R. 7661 reveal not only the specific works deemed to be “art” or “classics,” but the nature of the organization that would determine those exemptions.  The bill notes that exemptions to this policy will be determined by works featured in the Smarthistory guide to AP Art History, volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 (2019–2020), the Great Books of the Western World published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, and lists of classic books published by Compass Classroom. While Encyclopaedia Britannica and AP Art History are more historically entrenched names, this might be the first time you’re hearing about Compass Classroom. Compass Classroom produces online homeschool curricula that the company says are designed to teach and promote a “Christian worldview.” Founded in 2010 as Visual Latin, they have expanded their program across various educational fields and subjects. However, it is not clear how many users they currently have or why Compass Classroom’s “Classics Every Middle Schooler Should Read” and “Classics Every High Schooler Should Read” lists are cited as exemption references in this bill. Regardless of opinions regarding the specific works included on those lists (which contain everything from Common Sense by Thomas Paine and The Lord of the Rings trilogy), critics of this bill have raised questions about why a Christian-focused homeschool curriculum company is potentially legally defining arts and classics, as well as why this particular company was chosen to make those distinctions.  The Biggest Supporters of H. R. 7661 The full list of representatives who introduced H. R. 7661 can be found at the top of the bill itself. However, the bill’s biggest proponent is Illinois Representative Mary Miller. Since being elected to the House of Representatives in 2020, Mary Miller has been a vocal adversary of the transgender community. In 2021, she introduced the Safety and Opportunity for Girls Act, which would have determined, among other things, which bathrooms transgender students are allowed to use in schools. In 2025, she called for a federal investigation of Illinois’ decision to allow transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports. That same year, she misgendered Representative Sarah McBride while introducing her.  However, Mary Miller’s most notable controversy in regards to this bill occurred in 2021 when she was filmed during a speech saying, “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” Miller was criticized for her statements by members of the Republican and Democratic parties as well as various advocacy organizations. Mary apologized for her statement a few days later, but noted that “This dark history should never be repeated and parents should be proactive to instill what is good, true, right, and noble into their children’s hearts and minds.” That statement is being reexamined in light of the nature of H. R. 7661. What Precedent Is There For H. R. 7661 to Pass? On a federal level, there is little historical precedent that suggests H. R. 7661 will pass. In fact, a bill with a similar name and slightly different language (H.R. 9197, also referred to as the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act”) ultimately never made it out of Congress. H.R. 2616 (the PROTECT Kids Act) may be a closer comparison. It also included provisions related to removing federal funding for schools that made “sex-based accommodations” for students and was similarly compared to the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. That bill also did not pass Congress. The Parental Bill of Rights Act (which featured some overlapping provisions and somewhat similar ideas) passed through the house but was not taken up by the Senate.  Since H. R. 7661 was introduced, some critics of the bill have treated it as something that will almost certainly never become a law in its current form. While there are numerous precedents that support that viewpoint, recent laws passed at the state and local levels have some concerned that we may no longer be able to comfortably rely on federal precedents. If it feels like you have been reading more and more stories about books being banned in schools and libraries in recent years than you ever heard before, it’s because you probably have. Since 2021, there has been a noted rise in state laws that enable communities to have greater control over what books are allowed in K-12 schools. As PEN America reports, the majority of those bans in recent years have been led by advocacy groups, though a growing number are more directly associated with elected officials.  During the same period, there has been a well-documented rise in laws that target transgender people: the group most directly targeted by H. R. 7661. Translegislation.com has identified 747 introduced laws since 2021 that would negatively impact the rights of transgender and non-conforming people in some way. 308 of those laws have been passed, with recent years seeing a substantial increase in laws introduced and passed (2025 was a record year for both). 23 bills considered to be anti-trans in some way have been passed in 2026 so far.  And though this has been referenced throughout this article, it is worth mentioning again that 2022 was the year that Florida passed the controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The implementation of that law sparked a new era of state and federal government officials either introducing laws that utilize book bans as part of a “sexual content”-driven agenda or working to implement laws that will prevent such bans from occurring. During that same time, we have seen a rise in teachers effectively self-censoring their lessons out of fear of punishment or simple confusion over how, exactly, they can be in compliance with existing laws.  While the validity of the popular idea that we are living in unprecedented times depends on a number of technicalities and interpretations that often interfere with the spirit of the statement, those numbers support the idea that we are living in an era of book bans being used to enforce certain ideologies and suppress others that we have not seen in the United States for quite some time.  What Can You Do If You Oppose H. R. 7661? If you oppose H. R. 7661, there are a few practical actions you can take to help prevent it from being passed.  You can contact your representatives to let them know that you are a constituent who opposes this act. 5Calls has a page dedicated to this act that will help tell you what to say to your representative’s office, as well as find their contact information.  Similarly, you may consider supporting H.R. 6440 (aka the “Right to Read Act of 2025”). This act would expand the funding that many community libraries receive as well as help protect library staff against legal actions associated with book bans. As always, please be sure to study the bill’s exact intended effects and provisions before contacting your representatives.  Unite Against Book Bans, the Office for Intellectual Freedom, PEN America, and the International Literacy Association remain some of the most popular and trusted groups for resources and information related to stopping book bans such as H. R. 7661. There are numerous similar organizations and communities at local, state, and federal levels that offer and accept similar support. You can find some of them here. And though these sometimes feel like minor acts of civil reform, it is always worth saying that some of the best things you can do is support your local libraries and librarians, support the individuals and groups most commonly affected by similar laws, and help spread the joy and importance of reading by donating books, donating your time, and simply continuing to read. [end-mark] The post What to Know About the National Book Ban Bill appeared first on Reactor.

Books worldbuilding Seven Plot-Friendly Ways to Spur Societal Collapse History can teach us the most exciting ways to destroy fictional civilizations… By James Davis Nicoll | Published on April 1, 2026 “Fire of Troy” by Kerstiaen de Keuninck Comment 0 Share New Share “Fire of Troy” by Kerstiaen de Keuninck I’ve recently gone down a rabbit hole, obsessively reading and watching works about the Late Bronze Age Collapse: a time when civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East suffered a near simultaneous implosion. Governments fell, trade networks collapsed, and some cultures lost writing1. Why did this happen? Ask that and you may go down the rabbit hole too. Historian and archaeologist Eric H. Cline thinks he knows why this happened, and also how to avoid it. In a recent video, “1177 BC: The vanishing of the first globalized world,” he lists seven pointers for cultures who want to avoid social collapse. I guess that’s fine for people who have become accustomed to enjoying regular meals, living in unburned homes, and not being stabbed to death by rampaging Sea People. You know, squares. But if you’re an author, you may look at that list and wonder if it could be a plot generator. Societal collapse can make for interesting reading! Aren’t we here for that? All we need to do is imagine societies that do the exact opposite of the strategies Cline suggests. You might not get a full-blown apocalypse—life might even improve, at least for some—but the results cannot help but be entertaining. Cline’s list: Have multiple contingency plans Cultivate resilience to invasion Be self-sufficient without alienating allies Be innovative and inventive Prepare for extreme weather Have a secure water supply Keep the working class happy The AntiCline list is the above, with the word “Don’t” appended to the beginning of each sentence. It’s astonishingly easy to come up with examples for each2. DON’T have multiple contingency plans One fictional example of a society that needed at least one more contingency plan than it actually had is the America of Michael Swanwick’s In the Drift. The Three Mile Island event spreads radioactive fallout across the Eastern Seaboard. Cities are abandoned and the US fragments. Recovery takes decades. Not fun, but very plot-friendly. DON’T cultivate resilience to invasion The nations of the world are understandably ill-prepared to resist aerial invasions in H.G. Wells’ The War in the Air, since aeronautical warfare is an entirely novel development. To make matters far worse, in the course of the novel it turns out that air forces are easy to produce and impossible to defend against… with the unpleasant catch that air forces cannot occupy, only destroy. Result: the end of civilization as we know it. DON’T be self-sufficient without alienating allies In Frank Herbert’s Dune, interstellar travel is dependent on Spice, a drug with a single known source, the planet Arrakis. As one does when supply disruptions could kneecap the galactic civilization, the empire has not only not developed substitutes for Spice, they’ve spent centuries brutalizing Arrakis’ Fremen, laying the foundation for some suitably charismatic visionary to use imperial dependence on Spice against the empire. DON’T be innovative and inventive In H. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, only Styphon’s priests know how to make black gunpowder. They’ve used this closely guarded secret to make themselves the power brokers of an alternate North America. Efforts to reverse engineer gunpowder are presumably strongly discouraged. This very sensible approach has at least one significant flaw, which is that as soon as someone—a cunning alchemist, a disgruntled priest, a Pennsylvania cop accidentally dragged across timelines—reveals the secret, Styphon’s international order rapidly implodes3. DON’T prepare for extreme weather Kate Wilhelm’s Juniper Time is shaped by a development for which no government appears to have made sufficient plans. The entire planet is gripped by massive drought. The cause is unclear but no nation escapes the disruptive effects: famine, mass migration, societal disruption, and collapse (at least on local levels). DON’T Have a secure water supply In Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the Earth is (rather implausibly) dependent on lunar farms, which are in turn dependent on lunar ice mines. The problem is lunar ice is very much a non-renewable resource whose limits are fast being reached. The solution on which those running the Moon have landed is to ignore the problem. Result: the collapse of the old lunar order as desperate Lunarians finally rise up. DON’T keep the working class happy African American slaves in Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain are unpaid, abused, and terrorized. The slavers’ intent is to keep slaves too cowed to object. The result is a population highly motivated to rise up and drive out their oppressors, should the opportunity ever present itself. Thanks to Harriet Tubman4, the successful raid on Harper’s Ferry provides that opportunity. Result: not only does independent Nova Africa replace the slave states, and not only is the USA itself ultimately overthrown, but the imperialist world order itself collapses in the aftermath. Admittedly, all that is good for the people at the bottom, which is to say the vast majority of the human species, but I imagine people like Cecil Rhodes, Lorrin A. Thurston, and King Leopold II died angry. …Also a good result. The above seven are just a few of the possibilities offered by cultural AntiClines5. SFF abounds with examples I could have used. The odds are very good that I’ve missed your favourites. Comments are below.[end-mark] Writing would have been practiced largely by castes of scribes, castes dependent on government and commercial support. ︎The obvious option is to list five works set during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. There are least two very famous works, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Even with a very generous definition of five, two is not five. So I think I’ll go with seven current examples. How hard could that be? Later: not hard. ︎“But surely removing priestly boots from the necks of violent, highly competitive aristocrats is a good thing?” you ask. Styphon was motivated to keep conflicts going to ensure demand for gunpowder. At the same time, they needed to keep conflicts low-level, as apocalypse tends to undermine demand. How sure can we be that what followed the fall of Styphon’s international order wasn’t a recapitulation of the Thirty Years War? ︎“But what of John Brown?” you ask. He gets a lot of credit for what is actually Tubman’s strategic and tactical insight. The lesson here is ambitious men should be mindful for opportunities to upstage brilliant women. ︎Remember to CamelCase or geologists will get confused. ︎The post Seven Plot-Friendly Ways to Spur Societal Collapse appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV They Will Kill You They Will Kill You Is a Gore Fest Running Thin on Substance If I had a nickel for every time a woman tried to save her sister from wealthy devil-worshippers, etc… By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on March 31, 2026 Image: Warner Bros. Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Warner Bros. To begin discussing They Will Kill You, there’s an immediate aside that comes up about the fact that two films featuring devil-worshipping wealthy folks who are trying to sacrifice a woman and her sister to appease their dark lord were released within a week of each other, and the plots were so similar that the trailer of one was cut to omit that fact entirely. (The trailer for this one, in fact.) Given the state of things, I’m hardly one to look askance at two similarly decorated cakes and call myself the injured party. Having said that, the greatest praise I can offer this film is that it is a diverting way to spend 94 minutes. If that’s all you’re looking for (and your tummy is unbothered by excessive, silly gore), go forth and enjoy! Extra cake for you, everybody is a winner. My first point of disconnect from the experience is a tonal shift that occurs right at the start. The opening of the film features Asia Reeves (Zazie Beetz) and her younger sister trying to escape a sadistic home. It is a dark, tense sequence with nothing remotely fantastical about it, and we get the background of our protagonist in full: Asia shoots their father when he catches up to them, but on hearing the sirens, she runs. She leaves her sister with their abuser still alive, and winds up getting caught anyway. Ten years later, she’s arrived for her new job at The Virgil, a fancy building in New York with a dark secret. If you assume that she’s looking for her little sister, Maria (Myha’la), you’d be head of the class. The film promptly descends into gonzo violence and absurdity, a world that feels totally disconnected from its first ten minutes: We learn that the building’s residents have a pact with Satan for eternal life, and their goal is to sacrifice Asia to keep that pact. They are immortal, so Asia can’t kill these people—only slow them down. Her sister is a maid in the building, and sometimes “the help” also get to join the pact (though they stay “the help,” of course). So Asia is stuck trying to outwit a bunch of wealthy, unkillable acolytes. There’s no more filling in between the lines; that’s the entirety of the story. What’s more, there’s practically no dialogue from that point on outside of questions about where Asia is, and why they need her to just give up and allow herself to be sacrificed. It feels as though screenwriter Alex Litvak and co-writer/director Kirill Sokolov had a book full of action sequences they wanted to film and made some sparse choices about the plot as an excuse to knit the whole thing together. Obviously, They Will Kill You has the vaguest echoes of the seminal Get Out and its more direct companion Ready Or Not, but both of those films were explicit commentaries about the institutions they were critiquing. They Will Kill You pretends to try—there are one or two pieces of extremely on-the-nose dialogue to that end—but knows it doesn’t really have to. Asking your audience to root against wealthy death cults isn’t a tall order when the general populace is pretty fed up with the uber-rich pretending that they have society’s best interests at heart.  Acknowledging that there is a clear racial aspect to this disparity could have been one place where They Will Kill You distinguished itself. The outline of a suggestion is there via The Virgil’s (mostly) POC staff and (mostly) white residents, the elevation of its superintendent (Patricia Arquette’s Lillith Woodhouse) and her husband (Paterson Joseph’s Ray Woodhouse), and the disagreement between Lillith and Ray about continuing to participate in this heinous ritual. But the way the film goes about addressing these issues only raises more questions: Ray tries to help Asia, and when he’s caught, he tells his wife that he used to believe in what they did for Satan because they were “cleaning up the streets” but now they were just murdering unfortunates. So, apparently, Ray thinks that some impoverished people are worth saving and others aren’t? Or that certain types of criminals deserve to die? That kinda seems like a big deal? The action sequences are cribbing a lot from giants of the genre in ways that feel frankly self-indulgent. Asia begins her evening at The Virgil sitting up in bed and clutching a lighter with a samurai etched into its casing, every flip of the lid suggesting the cut of a katana and a spray of red. It turns out that Asia also packed a machete, and soon she dispatches her first assailants with Kill Bill-esque gouts of blood. Later on in the film, Maria asks Asia where she learned to fight like that, and Asia glibly replies, “Prison.” You’d assume that meant we were in for a flashback of epic proportions, where we finally get introduced to Asia’s sensei? Ah… nope. That was the whole joke. Also, the samurai-style trappings are quickly dispensed with and never really return. There are grotesque body horror elements to contend with as well, as the immortal denizens of the building recover from every indignity that Asia visits on them. The only one that really garners the enjoyment it should is Sharon Vanderbilt’s (Heather Graham) plucked eyeball that rolls about trying to find Asia as her head regrows. It’s a lot of fun (even if the “regrowth” aspect doesn’t make much sense) until you notice that the eyeball can apparently hear all by itself? Sans ears? At which point, a really enjoyable bit promptly falls flat. Even noting that, I sort of wish the eyeball had become more of a main character throughout the film’s duration—it was one place where the film’s better tonality comes clear. The pig head on a stick as the avatar for the Devil is less exciting than they clearly think it is, though. If you’ve seen Peter Jackson’s earlier zombie films or anything Sam Raimi puts out or you went through a Cronenberg phase, this is just more of that thing you’ve already seen done better. The movie keeps upping the ante for action, and ends in the sort of bloodbath you’d expect, but the machinations stop being interesting long before we reach the summit. There’s also setup for a sequel that feels entirely unearned, though not surprising. It’s a shame because Beetz deserves a better career than the one she’s currently embarked on, and she is dead fun to watch. Someone give her a better action hero than this.[end-mark] The post <i>They Will Kill You</i> Is a Gore Fest Running Thin on Substance appeared first on Reactor.