Excerpts Horror Read an Excerpt From The Unheld by Luke Larkin A girl journeys across the haunted Montana Territory to rescue her father from an otherworldly creature. By Luke Larkin | Published on July 28, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Unheld by Luke Larkin, a horror western out from Hyperion Avenue on August 25th. Charlie’s life is a lonely one. While other twelve-year-olds are in school, she spends her days skinning the animals her mercurial father hunts in the woods just outside their cabin. And the woods and its twisted creatures—an owl with four wings, a boar with two heads, a fox with gills—are becoming stranger by the day.One night, a nightmarish beast appears and drags Charlie’s father into the wilderness. To find him, she enlists the aid of two unlikely allies also in search of the beast: an Englishman with a connection to a mysterious occult society and a Northern Cheyenne policeman exiled for a crime he didn’t commit. Yet as the trio prepare for the confrontation with the beast, Charlie must decide if her father, a brusque man who has always withheld his affection, is ultimately worth saving. Buy the Book The Unheld Luke Larkin Buy Book The Unheld Luke Larkin Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Charlie followed her father along the dusty road and did her best not to look at the hog. It lay heavy in the back of the cart, jerking awkwardly this way and that with every rut and stone the splin­tered wheels met, and with every jostle Charlie’s father cursed the thing under his breath. He cursed its ugly, gnarled hooves and its ugly, rib-lean belly, and its ugly, ugly heads. The hog paid him no mind. It just lay in the cart, dead and watching Charlie from its two sets of vacant eyes as she followed behind, grinning with its two twisted mouths, both held open in silent squeals. It was a staring contest, two against one, and Charlie was an unwilling opponent. She wished the thing were gone and hoped her father would sell it quickly. “What’re you up to back there?” her father said in his gruff voice. “Sure as hell don’t feel like you’re pushing. That’s the deal. I pull, you push. Unless you’re fixing to pull, but I can’t say you’re much good in front.” Charlie didn’t want to push. She didn’t want to come any closer to the grotesque animal her father had shot and killed in the forest. He’d hunted plenty of strange creatures in the past few months, none fit to sell: a mink as long in the body as a snake; a pheasant with the wings of a sparrow; a fox that, for as far as her father could figure, had gills on either side of its throat. Once, her father brought home a mountain lion, and Charlie watched, squirming, as he split it down the stomach with his knife and found nothing at all on the inside, as though the animal had been only a walking pelt, empty save for the stale and putrid air that rushed out of the cavity and licked Charlie’s face. The hog was her father’s first quarry in weeks that was nor­mal enough to sell, and he was hoping to get a good price at the butcher. It was the same for every hunter in the territory—mostly twisted-up animals that nobody dared eat. A hog halfway normal was bound to fetch a halfway fair sum. Or so they hoped. This all began with the disappearance of the deer last fall. Charlie’s father, being a hunter and so often wandering in the forest, was among the first to notice. He ventured out from their cabin into the trees and came home empty-handed for a week straight, and this set his temper simmering. For days, he trudged through the door and stamped the muck from his boots and grum­bled: “Ain’t a damned one out there. Not a single goddamned one.” He’d say this more to himself than to Charlie, and he’d mutter it all through the evening. A fruitless week became a fruitless month became a barren season with not a single buck or doe or fawn in sight, like they’d lit straight out for another country, perhaps one with better graz­ing, or fewer wolves, or somewhere without hunters to shoot them dead. That’s what Charlie figured, at least. But then the wolves disappeared too, and the bears next, and even the small fish in the streams, so that for a long while the only things to be found in the woods were the squirrels, chittering away as though nothing were amiss. Charlie’s father trapped and skinned and butchered these, and for a while the two survived on nothing but squirrel, and when they became desperate, they’d make the trip into Plainsend to retrieve scant milk and eggs and flour, paid for with credit from the grocer, though who knew how long until Charlie’s father could pay the grocer back. Then the beasts. That’s what her father called them. They weren’t animals, or they were almost animals, but with some other thing mixed in as well. Too many eyes, or too few. Mismatched tails and missing limbs or too many heads, like the hog before Charlie now. The very first her father ever shot was a headless coyote. He brought it home to the cabin and Charlie helped him butcher it, holding its hind legs splayed as he took to it with the knife. Where the coyote’s head should have been, its neck simply ended in a mound of fur. They couldn’t bring themselves to eat it. The meat was tough and scant, but there was also something foul about the animal itself, something that eluded Charlie and her father, and that they didn’t care to think on. Her father burned the coyote, and he burned the next two animals—a goose with fur rather than feathers and a rabbit with the legs of a fawn. They were wicked, he said. But he couldn’t afford to burn them for long. They had to eat. Eventually, Charlie’s father shot whatever he saw—wickedness be damned—and brought the animals to the butcher. The butcher turned up his nose and waved him away and the people crowded around outside to see what new and terrible thing the hunter and his daughter had bagged now. Sometimes Charlie’s father could sell his catch to a passerby. More often, he and Charlie wheeled it back out of town and nearly blackened it over a fire. It was easier to swallow that way. “Meat’s meat,” her father said over his bowl. And true, Charlie thought, even the wicked and malformed animals looked harmless when diced and smothered in a stew. Or at least then you couldn’t tell them from the normal ones. They ate what they could stom­ach, save for the fish, which returned to the streams as strangers long in the body or else with too many spiny bones or their gills bleeding black bile, and always they tasted rancid and contami­nated every stew they entered. At any rate, the animals weren’t right, and that was just the start of it. Excerpted from The Unheld, copyright © 2026 by Luke Larkin. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Unheld</i> by Luke Larkin appeared first on Reactor.

News Pan’s Labyrinth James Cameron to Guillermo del Toro on Pan’s Labyrinth 3D: “If You Take Less Than 300 Days, I’ll Kill You” The director’s “by hand’ approach to the restoration included forbidding the use of AI By Matthew Byrd | Published on July 28, 2026 Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Studios Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is not only returning to theaters later this year but is being converted to 3D for special limited screenings. A 3D conversion of such a film for a re-release requires a tremendous amount of effort, but Del Toro has been adamant that the process not be rushed in order to ensure that the conversion meets his standards and the standards set by the original film. Del Toro also mentioned that another legendary director had some choice words for him about the benefits of not rushing that process. “When you convert to 3D, there are two ways: quick or good. I chose good,” Del Toro told Gold Derby as part of a retrospective on Pan’s Labyrinth. “Specifically, when I talked to Jim Cameron about conversion, he said, ‘If you take less than 300 days, I’ll kill you.’ Because you have to put in the time — you go to every element by hand. A human made a decision. We’re redoing some sound elements, remixing it in Atmos, and doing a new color pass.” The “by hand” line is apparently more than a saying. At SDCC, Del Toro mentioned that he was adamant that nobody use AI software in any way to restore and convert the film. “I said, ‘Absolutely no goddamn AI,'” Del Toro told a cheering SDCC crowd. “What we’re protecting is the beauty and the redeeming power of art. It’s not about who gets the job. We are protecting a lineage of art. If we cut a generation of people from learning their craft, you’re cutting the rest of the history of that medium away from them for what?” Elsewhere in the retrospective interview, Del Toro emphasizes how much he had to fight for his vision of Pan’s Labyrinth, which, when coupled with the director’s previous statements about the use of AI in filmmaking, certainly helps to explain the director’s no-shortcuts approach. You’ll be able to see the results of his team’s efforts when Pan’s Labyrinth is released in various formats across theaters on October 9.[end-mark] The post James Cameron to Guillermo del Toro on <i>Pan’s Labyrinth</i> 3D: “If You Take Less Than 300 Days, I’ll Kill You” appeared first on Reactor.

Books Seeds of Story Reversing Rivers, Raising Louisiana, and Revamping Reefs: Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky How science is trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on July 28, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. It covers how humans have tried to engineer nature, how that’s gone badly, and how we’re now trying to engineer fixes to our world-breaking failures. It’s both unsympathetic to the hubris with which we’ve claimed dominance—old boasts that “man every day is surpassing nature” earn example-ful criticism—and tentatively hopeful about our problem-solving abilities. It also reminds us that we should be careful, given how previous innovations have seeded the central problems of the Anthropocene. What It’s About Towards the end of Under a White Sky, Kolbert summarizes: “This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Case in point: the 19th-century engineering marvel that reversed the Chicago River, connecting it to the Mississippi watershed. This addressed a problem that was itself deeply Anthropocene: the excrement and stockyard viscera that clogged the river and flowed into the city’s drinking water. Success led to a pointedly blunt headline: WATER IN CHICAGO RIVER NOW RESEMBLES LIQUID. Combine that with another solution: DDT was first used as a military insecticide, then an agricultural one. It was a key part of WHO’s 1950s efforts to eradicate malaria. It also pushed bird populations to the brink of extinction. Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring founded the modern environmental movement and inspired a campaign to ban DDT. Carson suggested alternatives to chemical pesticides—such as using one biological agent, a targeted predator or parasite, to keep another in check. Following this advice, the US Fish and Wildlife Service imported Asian Carp to keep aquatic weeds in check. They also became part of wastewater treatment. Now they fill the Mississippi and threaten the Great Lakes through the inter-watershed connection created a century and a half ago. Enter new spider-to-catch-the-fly solutions, from electrified underwater fences to carp-bashing tournaments. Similar patterns abound. Kolbert covers sinking ground in Louisiana, where efforts to keep the Mississippi from jumping course have interrupted the natural restoration of silt to the banks, and where efforts to maintain existing land worsen the problem long-term. Then there’s the human-driven Sixth Extinction (on which Kolbert’s written a whole separate book), and our efforts to curtail it. On the edge of Death Valley, a cave harbors pupfish whose entire habitat is confined to a 60×8 foot lightless pool. A mile away, a replica pool breeds supplementary pups, and may replace the original (threatened by pumping and radioactive waste). Around the world, some species thrive around humans (crows, cockroaches), while others are entirely shaped by our decisions (dogs, wheat), but many suffer from our activities. Some do fine after a boost, while others, like the pupfish, become “conservation-reliant.” It’s not clear yet where reefs will fall on the extinction-to-reliance-to-recovery spectrum. Overheating bleaches many coral species, forcing them to expel algal symbionts gone haywire. If this goes on for too long, they starve. Kolbert visits a research aquarium in Australia, where coral and algae are bred for heat-tolerance, and tested against the projected conditions of 2050. Potentially, CRISPR gene drives could spread heat-resistance DNA through wild populations. Or robots might shade vulnerable ecosystems during heat events, or colder water could be drawn up from the deeper ocean. All options are risky, but something must be done unless we’re willing to lose a major ocean habitat. Gene drives don’t only spread beneficial characteristics. They are also being tested for reducing populations of invasive cane toads and rodents. The term “mice-nine” appears. From specific ecosystems and species, Kolbert moves to the atmosphere as a whole, and proposed engineering fixes to the boss-level Anthropocene problem of CO2 emissions. These range from injecting carbonized water into deep ground where it will mineralize, to planting trees (and then burying the mature ones rather than allowing them to fall and rot), to stratospheric aerosol injection. The first two directly address the problem—and in combination with reduced emissions could potentially get us into the realm of negative emissions, necessary for many of the most optimistic future climate models. Stratospheric aerosols could reduce immediate harm while we work on direct solutions—but could also lead to dramatic whiplash if paused before atmospheric carbon is successfully drawn down. It would also produce the white sky of the book’s title. All of these solutions involve engineering a system larger and more complex than the Mississippi River. What remains to be seen is whether we’ve finally learned enough to create interventions that do more good than harm. Buy the Book Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future Elizabeth Kolbert Buy Book Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future Elizabeth Kolbert Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Kolbert’s first book, on Anthropocene mass extinction, is from all reports extremely good. It’s also a depressing enough topic that it has sat on my shelf for years, unread. It therefore wasn’t until this week, reading Under a White Sky as a companion to What the Wild Sea Can Be, that I discovered that Kolbert’s funny. She’s absolutely rigorous, offering detailed interviews and in-person experiences in places most deeply affected by the issues she’s discussing. But she also relishes warnings about getting face-slapped by carp, quotes researchers’ frustrations as they wait for coral to spawn in captivity, and describes a rodent biocontrol group as “Dr. Moreau joins Friends of the Earth.” She’s clear-eyed about the dangers of climate change and healthily skeptical about geoengineering, but her curiosity and humor are good companions for exploring both. As I mentioned last time, my current work-in-progress involves high seas adventure during a time of severe geoengineering tradeoffs. Kolbert provides rich fodder. Stratospheric aerosol injections remain the idea that scares me the most. It’s easy to screw up, likely to mess with weather and crops in the most vulnerable places on earth, can be carried out unilaterally by a single powerful nation-state or amoral billionaire, requires the sort of consistent maintenance that we currently suck at, and is incredibly appealing to people still enamored of fossil fuels. It also—and this is the issue I haven’t seen anyone talk about, including Kolbert—seems likely to kick off an epidemic of permanent Seasonal Affective Disorder. White skies everywhere, year-round? Moon and stars blurred into a vague haze? This sounds literally miserable. Most interventions aren’t quite that horrifying, but carry the same sort of “whoops, didn’t see that coming” risks as imported carp. Rewilding takes care and caution for just that reason. The right species can restore a whole ecosystem; the wrong one can destroy it. Outside Amsterdam, newly-introduced bison thrive in our dunelands, and the dunelands thrive from their presence. Beavers can fix whole watersheds and are sometimes better engineers than humans. But cane toads, deliberately introduced to Australia, are a toxic menace to everything that tries to eat them. If we try to control them with gene-drives, what further side effects might arise? Much geoengineering falls into the realm of desperation: the status quo is too a poor an option to accept. Examining Greenland’s ice cores, Kolbert notes something alarming. For some time, the near-simultaneous emergence of fully-agricultural societies around the world has been a mystery—why 6000 years ago, and not 50,000 years earlier? Homo sapiens has been neurologically modern for much longer. You are not smarter than a Stone Age hunter-gatherer. Graeber and Scott lean toward agriculture as a hierarchy-promoting mistake, but that still doesn’t explain the synchronicity. The ice cores show the relatively stable climate of recent millennia to be an exception. “…in the midst of the last ice age, the climate of Greenland was so variable it could hardly be called a climate.” Average temperatures leapt 8 degrees C in 50 years, for example, then dropped back again. We see the same pattern in evidence from the Middle East, China and Europe. In such conditions, settling in one place long-term, let alone growing crops, simply doesn’t work. Nomadic hunting and gathering is the most adaptive choice. Then, post-Ice-Age, everything calms down: “All of civilization falls within this period of relative tranquility and so this sort of calm is what we take to be the norm.” Push the system out of that narrow balance, and it might not return any time soon. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories Racing Against Carbon. Some of the most interesting, promising, and difficult climate mitigation options involve removing carbon from the atmosphere and ocean. Immediately pre-Anthropocene, animal exhalation and volcanic emissions were approximately balanced with plant-based and sedimentary drawdown, resulting in approximately 280 parts per million (ppm) of CO2. Now we’re above 400ppm and rising. We can plant more trees and algae, but that only goes so far, and unless we bury them carefully, the carbon is re-emitted when they rot. But if we inject enough CO2 underground, it will calcify and remain there. There are several different methods being tested, none currently scalable—but success would change our calculus dramatically. There’s ample room here for stories about both the technical race itself and the political wrangling required to combine it with real emissions reduction. Rewilding the Spider to Catch the Fly. Both direct rewilding efforts, and the complications of invasive population management, make for great stories. We have to move beyond the myth of untouched wilderness—and speculative fiction in particular needs to think about what the future of nature looks like. How many ecosystems, and species, will require ongoing intervention? Can we return to an understanding—and a relationship—in which the human role in ecology is treated as natural? What conflicts will emerge between different approaches to that role? Groups training cane toad avoidance among predators may get along poorly with those developing gene drives for population reduction. (Or might learn to work together—geoengineering meet-cute, anyone?) New Growth: What Else to Read Kolbert regularly cites John McPhee’s The Control of Nature, a classic collection of essays on hubristic environmental engineering. His piece on the Mississippi’s imprisonment led to a plot point in A Half-Built Garden, and remains an ongoing obsession. Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore reports from communities in Louisiana and beyond dealing with disappearing land. Project Drawdown collects an encyclopedia’s worth of climate solutions, calculating their potential carbon impact and offering guidance for implementation; in addition to the website they also offer their most central ideas in book form. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future has become a core novel of climate mitigation. Don’t read it in the middle of a heat wave, or maybe do (but be prepared to obsessively check your local wet bulb temperature afterward). E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again is a slow burn tale of rewilding both places and hearts. Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star is one of the few stories I’ve read that imagines a post-agricultural world based on anything other than apocalyptic disaster. Sam Miller’s Blackfish City goes in a very different direction, with a new surge of hubristic engineering to create habitat for climate refugees in the Arctic. Share your favorite tales of wild engineering in the comments![end-mark] The post Reversing Rivers, Raising Louisiana, and Revamping Reefs: Elizabeth Kolbert’s <i>Under a White Sky</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News Spider-Man: Brand New Day A Surprise Source May Have Just Revealed Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘s Secret Villain It’s always the villain you most suspect By Matthew Byrd | Published on July 28, 2026 Screenshot: Sony Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Sony Pictures This article contains likely spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day The worst-kept secret in movies is apparently no longer a secret as the real “villain” of Spider-Man: Brand New Day (and the apparent identity of Sadie Sink’s character) has been revealed by an unlikely source. During a red carpet interview, singer Steve Lacy (whose track “oh yeah?” is on the Brand New Day soundtrack) was asked about his favorite character in the film. Though the interviewer actually warned Lacy not to spoil anything (a rare move), this was his reply.  “Jean,” Lacy said. “I like Jean. She’s the villain, but there’s a reason to her madness.” The moment itself is pretty hilarious, as Lacy weirdly seems to blink out of existence for a moment after the question is asked and stare off into the void before giving his answer. When the interviewer asks “Is that a spoiler?” Lacy shrugs and says “I like her character, I don’t know why.”  While there are some leaps in logic you could make at this point to provide alternate explanations for that answer (“Hey, maybe he was trolling” is the most popular one at the moment), the context of that interview suggests the cat is thoroughly out of the bag. Besides, months of rumors have already suggested that Jean Grey is the villain who is not quite what she seems in Brand New Day, so unless you think Marvel is working with double secret agents on an overtime conspiracy, this really just confirms what we all already know.  Lacy stops short of saying that Sink plays Jean Grey in the movie (thank heavens for small miracles if you work at the Marvel factory), but that’s certainly the next logical conclusion if you’ve been following the reports. Given that Spider-Man: Brand New Day is still projected to shatter most box office records, one can only hope that Lacy is forgiven for his hilarious lapse in judgment.[end-mark] The post A Surprise Source May Have Just Revealed <i>Spider-Man: Brand New Day</i>‘s Secret Villain appeared first on Reactor.

News Children of Blood and Bone Children of Blood and Bone’s Stacked Cast Is On Display in the First Trailer Years after the project was announced, we finally have a trailer for Children of Blood and Bone By Molly Templeton | Published on July 28, 2026 Screenshot: Paramount Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Paramount Pictures Seven years after the film was initially announced—which honestly isn’t really all that long in Hollywood time—we have a trailer for Children of Blood and Bone, writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi’s bestselling YA novel. The story of a young woman fighting back against a ruthless king who seeks to erase magic from her land, Blood and Bone was a blockbuster of a novel which landed its author on Time’s Most Influential People list in 2020. The adaptation took some years to percolate, but once it shifted to Paramount (from Disney and then Lucasfilm) and Prince-Bythewood came on board, it rapidly picked up steam. It also picked up an all-star cast that includes Thuso Mbedu (The Woman King) in the lead role of Zelie; Tosin Cole (Doctor Who) as her brother Tzain; Amandla Stenberg (The Acolyte) as Princess Amari; Damson Idris (Snowfall) as Prince Inan; Viola Davis (Peacemaker) as Mama Agba; Cynthia Erivo (Wicked) as Admiral Kaea; Idris Elba (Hijack) as Lekan; Lashana Lynch (Captain Marvel) as Jumoke; Regina King (Watchmen) as Queen Nehanda; and Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Old Guard) as King Saran. Paramount’s description of the film spends more words on the stars than the synopsis, which says only, “In the epic fantasy world of Orïsha, a young woman goes on a quest to reclaim the magic that was violently stolen from her people. She and her brother ally with the daughter and son of the king to fight back against his brutal rule.” Earlier this month, Adeyemi distanced herself from the adaptation, saying on TikTok, “I have not seen the film, and I will not watch it.” She is credited as writing the screenplay alongside Prince-Bythewood. Children of Blood and Bone is in theaters January 15th, 2027.[end-mark] The post <i>Children of Blood and Bone</i>’s Stacked Cast Is On Display in the First Trailer appeared first on Reactor.