Books Reading the Weird A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing: Nadia Bulkin’s “Things to Know Before You Go” This vacation carries a terrible curse… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on July 29, 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 Nadia Bulkin’s “Things to Know Before You Go,” first published in Kristy Park Kulski’s Stoker-winning Silk and Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror From the Asian Diaspora. Spoilers ahead! CW for suicidal ideation. Della and Mary are vacationing on the Indonesian island of Java. Della was born there, but her parents immigrated to the United States when she was young; since their household mostly spoke English, Della’s now embarrassed by her rusty Indonesian. Blond-haired Mary’s Indonesian is worse, but she gets points for her “try-hard shamelessness.” The two were college friends, and the bolder Mary always took the lead. She still does. Della chose their hotel with Mary’s preferences in mind. Now, as they lounge by the pool, Mary fidgets to get them out of it. A child’s fallen into the water, causing consternation among relatives. Della thinks how she might step into the pool, or off their third-floor balcony, or off a curb even. The critical thing: Her movement would have to be “stupid easy,” or she’d never take it, never make everything “go away.” Mary ignores the poolside fuss. She reads from Things to Know Before You Go: Indonesia. There’s a jungle hike that sounds cool, with a “sacred” path leading to a waterfall reserved for “members of the spirit world.” She laughs “uproariously” at the notion. Della, who had a superstitious Indonesian babysitter, tries to dissuade Mary from the outing, with her usual success. After six hours on a rickety bus up the Javanese mountains, Mary commands the driver to drop them at the trailhead. An old woman grabs Della’s arm and delivers a warning in mixed Indonesian and Javanese, from which Della gathers the syllables “Tuk” and “Kutuk.” Off the bus, she’ll remember that “kutukan” means “curse.” A wooden box demands an access fee of ten thousand rupiah for Indonesians, fifty thousand for foreigners. Della tries to deposit the foreigner’s fee. Mary talks her into the lower one. The remoteness and quiet of the trailhead disconcert Della. Where are the usual locals selling snacks or guide services? There’s not even a stray goat! Prickly vines obscure the trail. Mary pushes them apart and steps into darkness. Della follows. She reminds Mary that they have to catch the bus home by 4, earning exasperation. Can’t Della relax? Act like she wants to be here? Della can’t. She doesn’t like the way the trail proper is meticulously well-maintained, how sunlight penetrates the jungle canopy “uncomplicated by either heat or shadow.” Mary derides her fear they’re crossing into the spirit world, and asks sarcastically about protections. But Della’s babysitter, Mbak Susi, never provided any such hints, or even a definitive way of knowing one had passed beyond, other than “You’ll know.” Mary leads them up the path, which looks level but feels like it’s going uphill. She scolds on, about how Della doesn’t want to go to bars or clubs or even on a tame nature walk. Every time Mary suggests something, Della’s all no, no, no, but makes no suggestions herself. Della says she wishes they’d gone to Thailand. She pushes past Mary, expecting a snide remark, getting only “What is that?” Della looks back, at an empty trail. Mary has vanished. Kutukan, Della remembers. Curse. * * * Mary must have fallen off the path somehow, maybe broken an ankle, but Della searches the underbrush and finds no trace. She must be “losing it,” getting dehydrated and scared. She’s “regressing” to Mbak Susi’s horror stories, which were only fables designed to obliquely teach children about real dangers. She shouldn’t have left the main trail. She should’ve gone back to the road for help. If she had to succumb to delusions of a spirit world, she should dwell on Mbak Susi’s reassurance: The spirit world isn’t evil. It just knows how to bring out the wickedness in you. * * * She walks on. Finally she finds an isolated police outpost. The officer inside listens to her vague description of how Mary disappeared. She’s afraid Mary might have gotten hurt. He interjects, “Wasn’t that what you wanted to happen? When you pushed her?” So easy, it would have been, Mary always walking in front, Della the Dutiful always following. She always resented Mary, didn’t she? Was jealous of her, as she is of all her friends. The officer has this direct from Mbak Susi. And he produces a folder with the babysitter’s testimony…. Della denies the insinuations. Mbak Susi never knew about Mary, hasn’t seen Della for years, and besides, what if Della were jealous? What matters is that Mary’s gone! No, the officer says. She’s here with them. All Della has to do is look under the bushes to find Mary waiting for her. The outpost walls dissolve. Della averts her eyes from the yellow eyes, staring from the darkness. Again she insists she can’t find Mary. The officer sighs and tells her to sign a missing-persons report. The paper he slides over doesn’t look like a missing-person’s report. Its words squirm as Della tries to read. It occurs to her how easily she understood the officer’s language, how her own words had flowed to him. “Is this a dream?” she asks. “No,” he replies, handing her a pen. When she clicks it open, it hisses. * * * Locals find Mary first, evidently fallen several hundred meters below the main path. So alone, so pretty, so white. They worry her death will awaken rumors of evil. Della is found later, much deeper in the jungle. Her necrosis suggests death by pit viper, which relieves the locals’ fears of murder. The Americans’ story is a familiar one, young women gone into a remote forest without a guide and “fallen prey not to predators but to their own inexperience, their naivete, their loud and unrelenting ignorance.” It’s a “profound unbelonging,” and the land won’t expend its energy to forgive them. The Degenerate Dutch: In college, Della uses her Indonesian background as a “party trick.” She bites her tongue to avoid complaint about people’s reactions, which still doesn’t justify Mary mocking Indonesian beliefs and customs. Or Indonesian population density, a joke that isn’t funny at all. Libronomicon: This week’s shelf features Things to Know Before You Go: Indonesia, a useful guidebook that, among other things, describes a cool jungle hike. Why guidebooks are pointing people at spirit-world-only waterfalls… well, why not? It’s a bit of harmless local color. Madness Takes Its Toll: Della suggests “crazy people” as something to fear in the jungle, or perhaps the source of stories about the jungle’s dangers. The locals who find Mary’s body fear rumors “spiraling into ugly themes of madness and darkness and evil,” and are relieved to find clues to a different narrative. Ruthanna’s Commentary It’s a terribly pat trope: representatives of “civilization” visit someplace “exotic” as conquerors, missionaries, tourists, etc., only to discover to their detriment that the local “superstitions” are true. Done badly, as it historically is, it manages to maintain the conviction of all those scare-quoted words even as the locals turn out to know more than the newcomers. But really, doesn’t having your scary stories pan out simply go to prove how primitive you are? After all, so much of the value of civilized empire comes in making magic impossible. Column favorite Bulkin isn’t doing the trope badly at all, nor playing it straight. She’s asking what it means to be a tourist or a local, and what it means to know a place at all. Mary’s the more traditional visitor. She’s well-educated, white, confident in her privilege and comfortable outside her comfort zone. It earns forgiveness in a country that “doesn’t spend its fleeting energy trying to forgive.” Or perhaps it excuses her from offending in the first place. Mispronouncing her limited Indonesian, she compares well with others who look like her but insist on English. Della, on the other hand, falls into the awkward un-belonging of the diaspora. She looks local, remembers a few people and a few stories, and yet her language has lapsed. Mary’s A-for-effort is her shameful failure. Naturally more cautious than her companion, she also knows just enough to realize that there’s real danger in the country her family left. Mary’s having an adventure, confident that she can deal with whatever little difficulties arise. Certainly, anything that shows up in the guidebook must be safe to try. Della knows “misery and malice and lack.” She knows stories about why you should be scared, and none about how to survive the scary things. You’re supposed to avoid them, after all, not seek them out. She knows, too, that those stories are warnings, if not always accurate ones. But it’s been intellectualized: she wrote a Comparative Religions essay about “social programming through storytelling.” This is a real, common thing. Where western parents lay out blunt rules, many cultures use ghosts and monsters as a memorable way to warn kids away from misbehavior. Della’s babysitter, with her haunted bamboo, is a good example. Ghosts are more exciting than thorns, easier to remember. Ghouls and beasties out beyond well-lit streets can keep people close, safe, even compliant. But “we” the “civilized” know better. And Della knows that she’s supposed to know better—to giggle at “crazy people” and make the spirit world a joke. In America, she’s let her origins become “the most interesting thing about her.” She has stories about Indonesia rather than stories about herself. Other friends have Lyme disease or affairs with ethics professors, which I have to imagine go over less well at Thanksgiving. In Indonesia, then, her misery is in part the loss of that identity and the realization of how shallow it’s always been. The country is no longer hers, but neither is anywhere else. And Mary’s irritated that Della can be neither a native guide nor a full-on cheerful tourist. What would have happened, I have to wonder, if Della had fallen into one clear category or the other? Obviously if she were a true Indonesian, she’d have insisted on avoiding the jungle to begin with, or at least understood and heeded the elder’s warning on the bus. But if she knew nothing of the spirit world, could it have touched her at all? Could Mary have traipsed the vine-draped path solo, with no worse worries than snakes? Per the traditional trope, civilized visitors must either be entirely vulnerable, or protected by their imperial limits on reality. Here, I suspect, it’s Della’s own liminal nature that makes her vulnerable to the liminal threat. But then, the local story has her and Mary as two undifferentiated “young American women” full of “loud and unrelenting ignorance” and “profound unbelonging.” So Della loses her identity once again in death. It’s a warning not against exploring the darkness, but against doing so without being very clear about who you are, and where you do and don’t belong. Claim yourself, or something else will claim you. Anne’s Commentary Among Della’s  memories of her early life in Indonesia loom large Mbak Susi’s stories about Jagad Lelembut, or the spirit world. This paper in Javanologi: The International Journal of Javanese Studies describes the concept: “Javanese society holds a profound and enduring belief in the supernatural world, a system deeply interwoven with daily life and transmitted across generations. At its core lies the conviction that all elements of nature possess a spirit or soul (animism) and supernatural powers (dynamism). Trees, rivers, mountains, and even inanimate objects are imbued with spiritual significance… This stems from a core Javanese understanding of the intimate connection between the spiritual and the material realms.” The entities one might encounter in Jagad Lelembut range from local guardian spirits and ancestral forces, to the shapeshifting trickster Genderuwo, to vengeful human ghosts and sentient floating fireballs (banaspati.) My choice of most terrifying would be the Kuyang, a living witch who transforms at night into a vampiric disembodied head trailing its own viscera behind. Maybe Della meets one of these during her deep jungle wanderings. Maybe the necrotic state of her corpse was the result of a Kuyang battening onto her. Instead of the pit viper that authorities blame. In my obsessive zeal for identifying the unnamed snakes of weird fiction, I looked up the chief Javanese suspects. In addition to the Flat-nosed Pit Viper (Craspedocephalus puniceus) and Malayan Pit Viper (Calloselasma rhodostoma), there are three Trimeresurus species: the White-lipped Pit Viper (T. albolabris), the Mangrove Pit Viper (T. purpureomaculatus), and recent cartoon superstar, the Indonesian or Sunda Island Pit Viper (T. insularis). And now, back to our regularly scheduled nonherpetological programming. Bulkin’s story combines two highly compatible horror sub-sub-genres: The Vacation from Hell and the Clash of the Frenemies. How could two people as dissimilar as Mary and Della have ever gotten together? Okay, there was the crucible of the neighboring college dorm rooms, but why did they stay enough in touch after graduation to go on a major vacation together? Actually, it may be only too credible a bad bromance. Della gives Alpha-Blonde Mary someone she can always pick on and look good beside, a noncompetitor for Number One status. Mary gives Della an In-Crowd friend to simultaneously relieve and feed her sense of Not Fitting In. Not Fitting In isn’t a great self-image, but it’s better than no self-image at all. Better, that is, until they’re together in the one place where Della should be the one fitting in, and Mary is still showing her up. And picking. Picking and pecking away. But— The truth is that Mary is the outsider in Java. Incredulous of the spirit world and its “intimate connection” with the mundane sphere, she drags Della into a jungle where the barrier between planes is no sturdier than a thin veil of vines, and now Della has the advantage. At least she’s imbibed Mbak Susi’s tales of Jagad Lelembut and been told she need not be afraid. Mbak Susi assured her: The spirit world isn’t evil. It just knows how to bring out the wickedness in you. And at this point, Della’s primed to be wicked. Wicked enough to push Mary back, off the path and down a long drop. Problem. Jagad Lelembut hosts many spirits. Wronged ghosts, maybe, like the figure of Mary that floats through the trees, head too big, eyes out of place. Ancestral forces that take on the shapes of a police outpost and a policeman who knows what Della has done and who gets her to sign… what? Not a missing-person report but a confession? An acceptance of the terms of kutukan, curse? It’s harsh, but maybe the locals are right in their contention that the “two young American women” were done in not by mundane predators, animal or human, but by the curse of “profound unbelonging in a land that did not spend its fleeting energy trying to forgive.” Next week, we kick off our new longread with Chapters 1-3 of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau.[end-mark] The post A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing: Nadia Bulkin’s “Things to Know Before You Go” appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Pilgrimage Let’s Talk About That Time Tom Holland and Jon Bernthal Played Medieval Irish Monks Even without the costumes of Spider-man and the Punisher, Holland and Bernthal play out a similar dynamic… By Leah Schnelbach | Published on July 29, 2026 Credit: RLJE Films Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: RLJE Films Pilgrimage is a strange film. It’s dark, and violent, and kind of a Catholic version of Lord of the Rings—or, well, a more blatantly Catholic version I guess, as it’s about a group of medieval Irish Catholic monks. Somehow a monastery clinging to the western shore of Ireland ended up with a powerful relic that traveled all the way from the Holy Land. Because a new Crusade looms on the horizon, Pope Innocent III sends a monk named Brother Geraldus to retrieve it and bring it to Rome, and thence to the Holy Land, where it’s believed it will help them against infidels and heretics. In most movies of this type the relic would be a piece of the True Cross, a scrap of a significant shroud, a fingerbone or the tooth of a saint, and it would have a mystical healing property.  Not here. Here the relic, the holy artifact that the monks have vowed to protect with their lives, is the rock that was used to murder St. Matthias—who wasn’t even one of the original twelve apostles, but rather a man chosen by lot to replace Judas Iscariot. An apostolic substitute player, basically. The rock has a very dark vengeful miracle associated with it, which has given it a reputation more akin to Spielberg’s version of the Ark of the Covenant than any sort of miraculous healing properties. And the big catch? Supposedly the relic can bring great harm to people who touch it—even the devoted monks try not to touch it, or look at it too long.   But why am I writing about a decade-old Irish medieval monk movie this week? Credit: RLJE Films Well it’s because Tom Holland plays a novitiate monk named Diarmuid who becomes the Darkly Miraculous Rock-Bearer, and Jon Bernthal plays his muscle, a silent, stoic, man with puppy dog eyes and an enormous cross tattooed across his back, who turns out to be very capable of violence. Between seeing Holland and Bernthal together in The Odyssey last week, and the upcoming Punisher/Spidey team-up in Brand New Day, I thought it would be fun to revisit this movie that I half-remembered liking nine years ago. And I was right! This movie’s fantastic. Very obviously small and indie, but weird and gritty and very much itself. While I liked The Odyssey very much, Pilgrimage does a lot of what I think Nolan should have done to create a feeling of uncanniness, and honor the true otherness of the past. And while I’ve loved Holland and Bernthal as Spidey and The Punisher, here they’re able to inhabit ground-level characters who make impossible moral choices in the real world—it felt kind of refreshing after years of superhero films, but also of a piece with their other performances. Holland plays a boy trying to prove himself to men with exacting standards, an Bernthal plays a man pushed into unspeakable violence by forces larger than him—just with no access to web shooters or sniper rifles. The plot is a simple road trip made rich with detail. The monks have to carry their relic to the port at Waterford, whence it will sail to France and then be carried across Europe to Rome. They have the protection of a few Norman guards, but given that the Irish are actively warring against the Normans, and that there are all manner of bandits between them and Waterford, the odds of everyone making it there and back again are slim. Pilgrimage is startlingly historically accurate, accurate to a point that the filmmakers seem not to care whether the audience can keep up. Even in the opening scene, the martyrdom of St. Matthias is brutal and short. Any idea of the glory of dying for God is dispensed with as the first rock flies. When the film skips from the Holy Land up to Ireland in 1209 C.E., there’s no romanticized misty valley full of scholars and saints—the monastery is a few small stacked stone, beehive-shaped buildings, a couple of open air huts, an ogham stone, a paddock. This isn’t the bustling center of learning in The Secret of Kells, this is a rough-hewn community that harvests seaweed and sea cucumbers for food. The Normans have invaded Ireland, and regard the Irish with barely concealed disgust. Some of the Irish, angry at having been invaded, have gone back to their pre-Christian ways. And of course, the English hover on the edges of the story, just waiting to cause trouble. This leaves our poor monks in a terrible position, as they want peace and brotherhood that would unite all people. Or at least all men—there are no women in this film. (Historically speaking, women religious would have had high status and shared monasteries with their brothers a few centuries earlier, but I think things were a bit more segregated by the 1200s, as the Irish church was forced to fall in line with Rome’s authority.) The factions are broken out in language: the Irish monks speak Irish, which was still spoken all over the country at that time. The Normans speak French, and the Latin that all the characters hold in common is played here by English, i assume to save us some subtitles. Only one monk speaks all three languages. The Normans and Geraldus are visibly annoyed when the Irish monks speak their native tongue. (And I am ecstatic to report both that Tom Holland does a good job with the language [at least to my ear] and that I understood a lot of the dialogue! The classes I’m taking in the back of that Irish pub are paying off!) Credit: RLJE Films The violence is brutal and matter-of-fact. The peace-loving monks are suddenly in a world of soldiers, where the solution to most problems involves inflicting pain, and the monks’ values are only held in high regard by the few men who have reached old age, and fear the judgement they face after death. But the film keeps this realistic, too. Fights are short, grappling, close-combat between terrified men who grab and chop at each other with  with swords or shield edges, everyone aware that death is only a breath away. There is a torture scene that is among the most upsetting things I’ve ever seen, but I wouldn’t call it gratuitous, it’s more that the film fully creates a world and commits to it. Brother Diarmuid is utterly out of his depth. He was seemingly raised by the monks—at one point an elder, Brother Ciaran, says the monastery is all he’s ever known—but does he even want to be a monk? In another difference from The Secret of Kells, Diarmuid isn’t like that film’s Brendan, a gifted young artist who feels a real calling, and apprentices himself to a master illuminator. Diarmuid has no special skills or otherworldly devotion. He’s grown up with the monks, knows nothing of the world outside, and finds himself fighting to survive, fighting to hold onto some level of his beliefs and moral values, with no real choice. He becomes the bearer of the relic partly by chance, and partly because the older men accept that his innocence might allow him to carry it without harm. Tom Holland is fantastic. I am among those who feel his acting has been a bit stiff for the last few projects—I rewatched the earlier Spider-mans and he’s great in them, funny and quick and with so much heart pouring out of his eyes. I thought he did well in The Odyssey, but it was still a bit restrained. Here, though, he shifts between English and Irish  with no hesitation, he fully embodies this character as he goes from a sweet, naive boy to a terrified young man desperately trying to survive a nightmare. Credit: RLJE Films Jon Bernthal plays a man whom everyone calls “The Mute” who literally washed up at the monastery, and acts as a servant to the monks, doing all the physical labor they can’t do. He is also devoted to Diarmuid. Was he a crusader? Are there bloody deeds in his past? Does he work for the monks to earn forgiveness and absolution? Is there some design in this troubled man turning up in a holy place, shortly before they’ll need his strength? He also gives an excellent performance, as he flicks his wounded eyes around, looking for all the world like a dog ho doesn’t want to get kicked… right up until his old life activates inside him and he turns into a wild-eyed berserker. The relationship between Diarmuid and his guardian is lovely. We learn that Diarmuid is the one who found the Mute (I assume he argued for him to be taken in like a lost puppy) and he never fears him. While the Normans speculate on his bloody past, and Geraldus attempts to use him as God’s chosen warrior, Diarmuid accepts him as he is. But again the film sticks to realism: Diarmuid is a boy in a world of men, and has no real power or ability to shield the Mute from other people’s cruelty; the Mute has a past, he’s weighed down by the belief that he needs to atone and that his strength will help him do that—but he is still a man, not a superhero. While he is stronger than most of the dangers the group encounters, there are still limits. These two are caught between Brother  Ciarán, wise, sad, desperately wishing he could protect the brothers from the world, Frère  Geraldus, a French Cistercian whose eyes light up with dangerous glee every time he talks about who belongs in Hell, and Raymond de Merville, a Norman nobleman who hates Ireland, has no great love for the church, and wants only power and glory, here and now. After all, there will always be another Crusade, and another shot at earning points for the afterlife. Richard Armitage is gorgeous as Raymond, snide, venomous, and devoid of pity. And John Lynch and Stanley Weber are beautifully matched as kind Ciarán and fanatical Geraldus. When the brothers head out on their journey, under the dubious protection of Raymond, the three men’s conflicting desires set them on a tragic path. Credit: RLJE Films Even at their best, pilgrimages are complicated things. The ideal version is a person or group of people travelling to a holy site out of devotion, hitting pause on their regular day-to-day life to be part of a larger community, to focus on their faith or their morality, maybe to do some good for people along the way. In reality, of course, pilgrimages are chaotic, expensive, and open to exploitation like anything. You have to have the money and privilege to be able to travel in the first place. You have to take time off, book lodging, buy food—all the stuff you’d have to do for vacation, but with the added burden of knowing that the trip has to mean something. You’re supposed to come back different. Holier, maybe. (People certainly end up “hole-ier” in Pilgrimage, but not in the way they might hope.) Titling this film “Pilgrimage” is a grim joke. The monks are removing the relic from its resting place—how it came into their possession we never know—and they’re taking it as a weapon, much as the Ark of the Covenant used to be carried. But even that isn’t enough, as the trip is hijacked for an even grubbier political scheme before it has the chance to be used as a weapon in a holy war. The movie gets across the extreme difficulty of medieval travel. You walk for days only to find that the bridge is out, and the only other path you can take is many more days of walking back the way you just came. Any time you meet another group on the path could mean your death. Any time you walk through a dense forest could mean bandits setting on you like ravenous wolves. And on top of that, this is a world of magic. Trees have symbols carved into them—guideposts? Warnings? Pleas to gods and spirits? The good Christian monks look askance at all of them, but they respect the Old Ways, and shudder from drinking water that flows past a fairy fort. The French Cistercian brother is infuriated by this, as he’s infuriated by most things, and the movie does a beautiful job of revealing his layers of zealotry—what would today be called fundamentalism—without ever tipping into anachronism. Credit: RLJE Films I’ve wanted to write about this movie for a while. I think it’s an excellent portrait of a fascinating time in history. A lot of people overplay their hand with this particular topic, out of an overabundance of pride in their Irish heritage, a belief in a kind of New Agey Celtic mysticism, or the tendency that’s hilariously called “Gaelmaxxxing” in certain corners of the internet now. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the Irish saved Western Civilization, because that discounts the work of a lot of people across Europe and the Middle East, Christian, Jews, Muslims, crypto-pagans, and people who probably considered themselves as unaffiliated as it was possible to be in that time, who were all copying manuscripts and making art and singing songs to try to keep the lights on, as it were. But, Irish culture is one my Special Interests. And it is deeply moving to me to think of these people in their tiny cold round huts working by candlelight, with no way of knowing if anything would survive the Norsemen or the British or general apathy, or if Doomsday would come and none of their work would matter anyway. I think about them a lot, these days, as people cede their own brains to “AI” and ChatGPT and Claude, as people take work away from living artists and hand it off to machines, as they cheer the tech billionaires who are destroying our one shared home and just salivating at the idea of turning us all into serfs. I think I love this movie so much because it honors the romance of that time, and the bravery of it, while also showing the reality of life, how harsh it was, how much zealotry and bigotry fueled things.[end-mark] The post Let’s Talk About That Time Tom Holland and Jon Bernthal Played Medieval Irish Monks appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club The Terminator: The Future Comes to 1980s Los Angeles James Cameron, time travel, slasher films, parent traps, and the making of a sci fi classic… By Kali Wallace | Published on July 29, 2026 Credit: Orion Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Orion Pictures The Terminator (1984) Directed by James Cameron. Written by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, and Michael Biehn. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first watched The Terminator. It came out on VHS in 1985, but we didn’t own a VCR until 1989 or 1990, so it was sometime after that, but before Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) came out. I do remember that watching The Terminator with my family taught me a valuable lesson about foreshadowing in storytelling. What I remember is my dad explaining why it was so obvious that Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) would be the father of Sarah Connor’s (Linda Hamilton) future son. He was the only other character in the movie, my dad said, and it was all set up to make him important before he died. When I was eleven or twelve years old, this ability to predict where a story was going blew my mind. Due to the unavoidable circumstance of being a tween girl in 1991, I was always more of a T2 fan, so I haven’t rewatched The Terminator as many times over the years. I am happy (but unsurprised) to come away from this viewing reminded once again that it really, really holds up. It’s just as great now as it was in 1984. There has been so much written about The Terminator over the years that it’s impossible to cover it all. It’s one of the most beloved action films ever made, starring one of the most famous men in the world, conceived and directed by one of the most successful directors of all time. It’s legendary, now. But that’s not what anybody expected back in the early ’80s when James Cameron wasn’t, you know, James Cameron yet. He was just a young, new director who wanted to start making his own movies. Cameron, who was born in Canada but moved to California as a teenager, fell in love with movies during the ’60s and ’70s. He got his start in Hollywood working at the studio of legendary B-movie director and producer Roger Corman. Corman’s studio served as a training ground for a number of actors and filmmakers (including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard, and so many more); he was also the man responsible for bringing foreign-language films by the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini to the United States. So having Corman as a mentor was a good beginning for a would-be filmmaker in the ’70s. Cameron started as a model maker and artist at Corman’s studio and on other productions. (Remember that he did the skyline matte paintings in John Carpenter’s Escape From New York [1981].) But he wanted to direct, and he got his chance at the start of the ’80s. Following the wild success of Jaws (1975), Corman produced the monster film Piranha (1978), which was written by John Sayles (who would go on to write and direct The Brother From Another Planet [1984]) and directed by Joe Dante (who would go on to direct Gremlins [1984]). Everybody up to and including Steven Spielberg knew Piranha was a cheap Jaws rip-off timed to capitalize on the marketing for Jaws 2 (1978), but that didn’t stop it from making a tremendous pile of money. Corman, as the head of New World Pictures, was surprised by the film’s success but had only a single-picture deal, so the sequel rights were in the hands of producers Jeff Schechtman and Chako van Leeuwen. They went looking for funding elsewhere, and they found executive producer and film financier Ovidio Assonitis. Assonitis was no stranger to putting out movies that were thinly-disguised rip-offs of successful films. Warner Bros. had sued him for his film Beyond the Door (1974), an Italian imitation of The Exorcist (1973), and he had already made his own Jaws ripoff with Tentacles (1977). Assonitis wanted to fund the Piranha sequel as an executive producer—but he had no intention of letting the film’s director have any say in the movie. He fired the first director, Miller Drake, before filming began. That’s where James Cameron came in. He was initially hired to work on special effects, but when Assonitis fired Drake, Cameron was promoted to director. According to Cameron, a lot of people warned him against taking the job, but he wasn’t going to turn it down. His first chance at directing didn’t last long. Assonitis still insisted on maintaining full control over the film, so Cameron lasted just over two weeks on set before Assonitis fired him and finished Piranha II: The Spawning (1982) himself. It’s always difficult to tease out the truth in the Hollywood “Who was the bigger asshole?” blame game, especially when one of the players is James Cameron, who is notoriously difficult to work with. But according to most of the cast and crew, Cameron was doing his best with the minimal resources available, while Assonitis was a fussy and controlling nightmare on set. Assonitis did bring Cameron back to work on editing the film during post-production in Rome, and the unconfirmed Hollywood legend is that Cameron would go back and re-edit scenes at night, while Assonitis wasn’t around to interfere. So here was Cameron, not yet thirty years old, already broke and bitter after being fired from his first directing job, possibly guilty of breaking and entering in hopes of either salvaging an incredibly stupid movie about flying piranhas or getting his name removed from the credits, and he gets sick as a dog in his Rome hotel room. In his feverish misery, he had a vivid nightmare about a metal endoskeleton clutching a pair of knives as it crawled out of a fire. He thought, rightfully, that this was a pretty badass image, so he wrote it down and made some sketches. (As somebody who also collects notes on my own and other people’s nightmares to draw or paint, I am charmed by this habit. It’s one of exactly two things I have in common with James Cameron.) When Cameron returned to the U.S., he worked with screenwriter Bill Wisher to develop that image into a proper story. He brought that story to Gale Anne Hurd, who was working as an assistant producer for Corman at the time. Hurd worked with Cameron on further developing screenplay. In order to get the production moving with Cameron as director, he sold the rights to her for $1. That’s part of why the Terminator franchise moved around between companies so much over the years as the rights have been sold and auctioned off. (Under U.S. law, the original authors can regain the rights after thirty-five years. That happened in 2019, and while it was big news at the time I’m having trouble finding details on the current situation. I think Cameron and Skydance have some form of joint control over the Terminator franchise.) Even though The Terminator is unquestionably a sci fi classic, and Cameron was an avowed fan of big, flashy sci fi from an early age, he didn’t set out to make his own 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or his own Star Wars (1977), or even his own Alien (1979) (which would obviously come about a few years later). He had something else in mind. He was going to make his own Halloween (1978). Camera said as much in a 2024 interview with Empire: “To me, Terminator was just a science-fiction version of Halloween.” He idolized John Carpenter (that’s the second thing I have in common with James Cameron) and imagined making a hugely influential slasher-style movie in the quick-and-dirty, low-budget manner he’d learned from Roger Corman. When Cameron and Hurd went looking for a studio to make The Terminator, they found the new-but-already-struggling Orion Pictures. Orion seems to have taken a fairly hands-off approach to the film, but they did insist on casting a major star to anchor the picture. Cameron and Hurd discussed this in a detailed 2014 roundtable interview with EW: they originally wanted Lance Henriksen to play the Terminator, but Orion president Mike Medavoy told them he wanted O.J. Simpson as the Terminator and Arnold Schwarzenegger as “the good guy, whatever his name is.” This is where we separate readers of this column by age, because some of us are old enough to remember when that was a terrible idea because O.J. Simpson’s public and screen persona was that of a beloved football star turned affable actor. He was too nice. As Cameron described it, “This was when everybody loved him, and ironically that was part of the problem—he was this likable, goofy, kind of innocent guy.” So Cameron and Hurd objected, but they didn’t have a high-profile replacement in mind. Cameron also hated the idea of casting Schwarzenegger as Kyle Reese. Conan the Barbarian had just come out, and he was certain nobody would believe Schwarzenegger as the protective good guy in the film. Cameron went into their meeting determined to find a way to refuse to hire Schwarzenegger. But they found themselves talking in depth about the Terminator character, and Cameron wanted Schwarzenegger for that role. Schwarzenegger was hesitant; the whole point of growing beyond his Conan fame was to take roles that weren’t just about being a strong guy perpetrating violence everywhere he goes. But Cameron talked him around to it, and the rest is Hollywood history. (By the time T2 came out and Schwarzenegger did play the protective good guy, he was well-known for his lighter side in acting thanks to films like Twins [1988] and Kindergarten Cop [1990]. But that was in the future.) Amusingly, both Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton have said that Schwarzenegger’s name being attached to the film gave them pause when they were offered their roles. Like everybody else, they were still thinking about Conan the Barbarian and didn’t know if the film—relatively low-budget, from an unknown director—would go anywhere. Rewatching this movie after many years, I find that Hamilton is still perfect, but Biehn is sort of the weak link in the cast. That surprised me, because he’s great in Aliens (1986) and The Abyss (1989). But he’s really kind of flat in The Terminator. I don’t think the script is doing him any favors, as Reese is the character saddled with all of the exposition, which means he’s got to earnestly try to explain time travel to some unimpressed cops (played by Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen) when we all know it won’t make a difference if they believe him or not. But it also doesn’t matter, because Sarah Connor’s doomed baby daddy is not what’s important in the film’s climax. What’s important is that sick-ass metal skeleton that rises from an inferno in the most delightfully frightening way. For the film’s visual effects, Cameron brought on our old buddy Stan Winston, who had recently worked alongside Rob Bottin on The Thing (1982). This would be the first collaboration between Cameron and Winston; they would become close friends and go on to work together on both Aliens and T2. This was the early ’80s, so everything is practical. The machines we see in the future apocalyptic wasteland are miniatures, which do a brilliant job of establishing, with pretty efficient visual shorthand, a future in which humanity is near extinction. All of the explosions are pyrotechnics, all the crashes and smashes are stunts, and every unsettling scene where the Terminator is losing part of his face or cutting away his skin is makeup. But the real star of the show is the Terminator skeleton. Winston has since passed away, but other members of his team talk about their process in that 2014 EW oral history, and there are some videos online (such as this one) that show clips of the process, which is all quite fascinating. According to John Rosengrant, Cameron and Winston started with Cameron’s initial drawings of the Terminator—the ones he developed out of that original fever dream he had in Italy in 1981—then the two of them went to junkyards to get some ideas for how a mechanical cyborg might look underneath its human skin. Winston and his artists had to make a full-body cast of Schwarzenegger, including his head, and Shane Mahan then sculpted the head to be a mechanical approximation of Schwarzenegger’s rather striking features. The skeleton was made from silicone and given its shiny chrome look using a process called vacuum metalizing, where an extremely thin layer of metal is deposited on a plastic surface in a vacuum. Tom Woodruff Jr. talks about sculpting the spine and pelvis so he could use those pieces to maneuver the Terminator’s torso as a puppet; he notes that when Biehn was whaling on the Terminator with a metal pipe, he was also whaling on Woodruff’s hand. Any time we see only the torso and head of the Terminator, it’s a puppet with glowing electronic eyes mounted on a crew member, moving around a Kern Foods fruit packing plant. It’s an incredibly clever mechanical and artistic creation, and it’s used to marvelous effect to make that machine feel like a real threat. The vast majority of effects were done in-camera—that is, what we see on the screen is what was actually happening, with puppeteers and strings and such cleverly hidden. The notable exceptions are, of course, the scenes in which the full-body skeletal Terminator is shown walking. Those clips are obviously stop-motion animation, with that slightly jerky, unnatural movement, but even that works in the film’s favor. The Terminator is a machine that has been battered and blown up and set on fire by this point, and that’s how it moves, and it’s terrifying. It all works together so beautifully. The Terminator is quite dark movie, and the action is often very chaotic and overwhelming, but we can always follow what’s going on. More than that, it comes together into what I would argue are some of the best action sequences ever put to film. The final third of the film in particular is phenomenal. There are clunky parts leading up to that, but once we get to that final stretch everything is phenomenal. The breakneck pacing, the unrelenting danger, the ruthless violence—I’ve seen this movie several times, and every time I’m still on the edge of my seat by the end. It’s that good. I keep thinking about Cameron’s stated goal of making a sci fi version of Halloween. For all the action and explosions and machines, for all the lore that has come up in the sequels, for all the iterations of the story that have followed, that’s exactly what he did, and that’s what makes it brilliant. It is, after all, a very simple story: A young woman has to survive an unstoppable monster. Like Halloween, it has relatively little dialogue beyond what is needed for exposition; whole stretches of the movie pass with little to no conversation. Also like Halloween, it’s filmed and takes place almost entirely at night; Cameron and Hurd specifically sought out locations in Los Angeles with mercury-vapor streetlights so they could film without having to build and light sets. The villain has unmatched presence but no personality or humanity. The tension ratchets up throughout the entire film with no relief. And, in the end, the final girl makes it out alive, but her survival is bittersweet. Sure, there’s timey-wimey stuff about the apocalyptic future and artificial intelligence and robots taking over the world, and it all hinges on the world’s weirdest Parent Trap plot in which humanity’s future savior has to get his subordinate to fall in love with his mom so he can send him back in time to effect his own conception. (The more you think about that, the weirder it gets.) Although T2 digs into it much more deeply, The Terminator only briefly touches on how the nuclear apocalypse comes about; we learn that humans built a defense system, and that system somehow came alive and tried to exterminate us, but the details are left vague. I love all of the sci fi elements—including that iconically grimdark vision of humanity’s future with the machines rolling over piles of human skulls—but the heart of The Terminator is a classic slasher flick with guns instead of knives and a cyborg assassin instead of a masked lunatic. And like a classic slasher, it is driven by fear. Fear of the strange man on the street. Fear of being in danger and nobody coming to help. Fear of enemies that can’t be reasoned with. Fear of humanity’s capacity for destroying itself. Fear of monsters made in our own image. Fear of what the future looks like when we value human life so little. It’s all in there, and it’s every bit as compelling now as it was when it became a surprise smash hit four decades ago. What do you think of The Terminator? How does it hold up compared to the whole franchise that followed? I’ve seen T2 and most of the third one, but I’ve never watched the television show (shows? are there two now?) or any of the other movies.[end-mark] The Dino Days of Summer Let’s make like it’s the Mesozoic and watch some dinosaur movies. Why? Because I want to watch dinosaur movies. August 5 — The Lost World (1925), directed by Harry O. Hoyt An early adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel, with dinosaurs made by stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien. Find it online. View the trailer. August 12 — Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), directed by Karel Zeman Classic Czechoslovak film about some boys who find a trilobite and go on a river journey through time. Find it online. (Check the usual unofficial places too.) View the trailer. August 19 — The Land Before Time (1988), directed by Don Bluth Would you believe that I’ve never seen this movie? I feel like that can’t possibly be true, as I was an American child of the appropriate age when it came out, but I have no memory of ever watching it. Find it online. View the trailer. August 26 — Jurassic Park (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg This one I have seen. It’s great. Let’s watch it again. Find it online. View the trailer. The post <i>The Terminator</i>: The Future Comes to 1980s Los Angeles appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations Seven Horror Books Featuring Freaky, Frightening Forests Sure, why not head up to the creepy cabin in the woods — what could possibly go wrong? By Sam Reader | Published on July 29, 2026 Morsel cover art by Emerald Barkley (Nightfire, 2026) Comment 0 Share New Share Morsel cover art by Emerald Barkley (Nightfire, 2026) Every summer, as many of us in the Northern Hemisphere go camping, spend time hiking, or just live close enough to woodlands to be serenaded nightly by a symphony of insects and animals, our thoughts turn to the darker and more mysterious stories about the woods. They’re a place of strange magic and even stranger creatures, places mostly untouched by humans where things so old we don’t have names for them might live. Horror has had a tradition of books and stories warning us “don’t go in the woods” since time immemorial, and with many of us heading out into nature to enjoy the weather (or just to find someplace shady in the midst of various heat waves), we thought it was good time for a refresher. Presented for your approval, here are some books about why it’s never a good idea to head into the woods unprepared, featuring some of the endlessly inventive ways in which authors manage to imagine the existential threats and primal horrors that might lurk within a shadowy woodland setting… Slasher Summer by E.L. Chen The oppressive woods play an important role in Chen’s cruel little thriller, as they so often do in any horror story where old friends head out to a relaxing weekend at a cabin deep in the woods. The forest and lake surrounding the remote cabin doesn’t just cut off the college students from civilization and any help as the killer mercilessly knocks them off—it also further isolates them from the rest of their lives: the people they are outside their individual roles in the suburban psychodrama that caused the killings in the first place. The victims in Slasher Summer are unable to escape the forest (sometimes literally…there’s a really gnarly kill with a tree branch) any more than they are able to escape their past selves, creating a brutally effective metaphor for people who can’t seem to break free from the small town where they grew up. It might be a little on the nose, but what part of a slasher movie isn’t? The Ritual by Adam Nevill The woods of The Ritual are oppressive even before the four friends on an ill-advised hiking trip through the Swedish mountains run into the gigantic deer effigy and the pagan chapel among the towering trees. They’re unnervingly quiet, isolating, and injuries start as if to warn the four that things are going to get worse from there. How much worse involves sinister effigies, pagan churches, sacrifices, teenage moonshiners, and monsters even Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson would hesitate to describe. It says something of Nevill’s craft and the horrors of the forest that despite what’s become of the four hikers by the end of the book and the brutality of The Ritual’s climax, the overwhelming sensation as the woods finally give way to countryside is guarded but qualified relief. Moonflow by Bitter Karella Karella’s debut novel exists in a strange intersection between subcultural noir, 1970s horror-fantasy, and Carlton Mellick III novels, one that sucks you in deeper the further the heroine travels into the feral Pamogo forest. Described as a spirit-inhabited sprawl that hates tourists, where the most reliable method of navigation involves literally knowing where bodies are buried, the Pamogo is a lightless expanse of thick growth and perpetual rain that perfectly matches the spiraling narrative in which things only get weirder the deeper everyone goes. The mushrooms that writhe like animals when humans touch them, the TERF separatist eco-murder cult, and elements too strange to give away here all succeed in making the Pamogo the bizarre, transfixing star of Karella’s equally bizarre and transfixing novel. Sarafina by Philip Fracassi Fracassi’s American folk horror tale of three Civil War deserters is set in another feral forest, this one much further south. Fleeing the Battle of Shiloh (one of two Fracassi books set around that brutal Civil War clash), three brothers find themselves lost in the woods and fleeing the Home Guard, who will kill them as deserters. Fracassi uses the forest to ramp up the tension marvelous to effect, with the woods closing in around the brothers as their options dwindle, with Sarafina and her son Titus seemingly offering them a relatively pleasant and bucolic sanctuary…or perhaps only a brief respite before the horrors begin anew. Little Wild by Laura Evans Little Wild is a book that plays with boundaries—romantic idyll against harsh reality, wild against tamed, madness against magic, queer love against keeping up appearances in society—so it makes sense that the area around The Lodge where Margaret’s father lives is both beautiful to behold and also incredibly foreboding, set against the repressive and aggressively English Snare House where the affluent Winthers live with their tamed “Wilderness.” The woods around The Lodge, where Margaret finds herself banished, are also unique in that there’s nothing particularly menacing about them in and of themselves—it’s more that it’s the site of deep family trauma, memories, and painful history buried beneath the surface. It’s also notable that the woods themselves are relatively benign but have a psychological effect on Margaret the longer she stays in the forest, the isolation and strangeness of her own situation (as well as the trauma of her father’s mental state and her mother’s death in the woods) causing her to see them in a different light. Morsel by Carter Keane Morsel takes the Appalachian Mountains of Ohio to a new level of unnerving. The strangeness of this version of Appalachia is characterized by the stillness of Keane’s forests and the utter wrongness that starts up after Lou arrives to check out a property as a pro bono assignment for her job and immediately finds stick effigies straight out of Karl Edward Wagner waiting for her. The situation’s worse than she imagined, as she quickly runs into coyotes, a corrupt and murderous sheriff, a multilevel marketing cult, and some kind of horrifying alien monster that bleeds black goo and feasts on anything living within range. All of this is disturbing, especially as Keane’s depictions of the clashes between Lou and the various evils of the woods are bone-grindingly visceral, but worse is how the violence unfolds in absolute stillness, the animal noises suddenly cutting out as if they’re willing spectators in Lou’s struggle for survival. How To Survive Camping: The Man With No Shadow by Bonnie Quinn Quinn’s dark, sharply funny horror stories are set in a world where the woods are full of bizarre dangers, though not presented in such a visceral, horrifying light. Kate, the manager of Goat Valley Campground, deals with the various supernatural entities the same way someone would an annoying coworker, bantering with entities like The Man With The Skull Cup on her morning rounds through the camp. It lends Goat Valley a witty, wry, naturalistic tone to its supernatural folklore—there are horrifying dangers all over the place, sure, but as long as the campers and camp staff are careful and follow the safety guidelines, they’re no more a threat than wild animals or bad weather. This only increases the horror once the entity known as The Man With No Shadow starts taking a direct interest in campers, resulting in what was naturalistic becoming deeply unnatural as more and more dangers are revealed…. These are, of course, only a small sample of books that explore the horrors of the deep dark woods. What are your personal favorites? Which ones might we have thought were too well-known to mention? Sound off in the comments![end-mark] The post Seven Horror Books Featuring Freaky, Frightening Forests appeared first on Reactor.

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.