Books Reading the Weird ROUSes Abound: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 12) Arthur’s confession reaches its conclusion, 100 years in the future… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on July 22, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we wrap up Stephen Graham Jones’s Nebula- and Stoker-winning The Buffalo Hunter Hunter with Chapters 23-24. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! The Absolution of Three-Persons, June 2, 1912. Arthur Beaucarne pens one last journal entry. On Sunday, all the eggs in the church crack black-yolked with ungodly corruption, so he precracks a yellow-yolked egg from the parsonage for display at mass. The service is still doomed. The purple stole on his podium has been replaced by a buffalo robe. In addition to his parishioners, the dead crowd the pews: Arthur’s son and grandsons, postmaster Clarkson and Sheriff Doyle and Pinkerton man Dove, and all the Blackfeet slain at the Marias. Arthur flees into the parsonage. No one inquires after him. Their preacher has turned leper. Before Good Stab comes for him, he’ll hide this journal. Soon he’ll see Good Stab’s fangs and know he wasn’t lying. Arthur’s heart feels black as the prairie night. His pipe is empty. He believes it’s been empty since January 23, 1870. The Beaucarne Manuscript, 12 January 2013. Etsy Beaucarne has presented her transcription of Arthur’s journal to her tenure committee. They’re unimpressed. One member shows off by remarking that Etsy should call her great-great-great-grandfather her “tresayle” instead—the French are “so much more efficient when discussing lineage.” They also suggest the so-called log may be fiction inspired by Stoker’s Dracula. And so Etsy, the “dayworker” of Communications and Journalism, won’t earn tenure at the University of Wyoming. At the end of spring semester, aged 43, she’ll need to figure out how to earn a living outside academia. One more disappointment for her father, on his deathbed in Denver. At least Etsy’s figured out some of her ancestry. Arthur’s son Benjamin Flowers, her great-great grandfather, was born to Ada Neismith, née Murray, the prostitute he bedded after the Marias Massacre. Benjamin’s surname came from the nurse who misheard “Beaucarne” as “Bouquet” and translated that to “Flowers.” The surname passed to Etsy’s great-grandfather Arthur, then to her grandfather Artemis. Later Ada told Artemis the correct name, and so it came down to Etsy. On her apartment balcony, she burns the copy of the journal that librarian Lydia Ackerman sent her. As the last page lifts away “like a prayer,” she glimpses through the snowstorm a figure behind a tree. She lurches backward so hard she breaks the glass sliding door. Somehow she’s sure it’s Arthur Beaucarne, her tresayle, haunting her. 20 January 2013. A bad week. Etsy’s cat Taz has disappeared. Her father has died, leaving a banker’s box of effects. Among family photos, his last unsmoked cigarettes, his wedding band, and his Zane Grey novels and DVDs, is his Bible with letters from her mother tucked inside, along with one unopened letter. Lydia Ackerman calls to say that the journal’s buckskin wrapping tested out as human skin! Also, has Etsy decided what to do with the original journal in Lydia’s care? Donate it? Auction it? Keep it herself? And Dad’s cremains arrive. Etsy looks at the unopened letter. Ominously, the envelope bears the logo of the Blackfoot nation, but no postmark or stamp. She realizes the letter wasn’t for her father, but for her, delivered in person while Dad lay dying. She doesn’t open it. She’s taking Benadryl to sleep, though it makes her “goopy” enough to hallucinate mice. What’s no hallucination is the figure she wakes to find: Good Stab tapping on her laptop. He’s grown a buffalo’s head; she screams and locks herself in her bedroom. Etsy’s next entry is neither a will or a suicide note, just a record of terror. Good Stab has returned Taz. He’s also arranged a “family reunion” in the form of Arthur Beaucarne, whom he’s made a nachzehrer. What Arthur’s been fed over decades, he has become: a giant prairie dog weeping blood. Good Stab disappears, leaving behind Arthur and his buffalo head (actually a mask). Etsy can’t keep a Rodent of Unusual Size like some rescue animal. She senses his existence is a hellish one. Has Good Stab given her the challenge of murderously feeding Arthur back to human shape, or putting him out of his misery? She sedates him with smoke from her father’s cigarettes and smuggles him into her Subaru, along with Taz and gear from a hardware/ranch superstore. Then she drives through the snowstorm to Wyoming, and Blackfeet territory: Nittowsinan, in time for the anniversary of the Marias Massacre. Etsy finally reads the unopened letter. It’s the confession Arthur wrote, but never sent. In it, he admits that he persuaded the scout Joe Cobell to start shooting at Heavy Runner’s camp, making Arthur ultimately responsible for the slaughter. Etsy manages to “kill” Arthur with a nail gun, cable saw, and ignited spray foam. Burning, his body plummets off the bluff from which soldiers shot Heavy Runner’s people. She throws his prairie dog head after it. Blackfeet riders have come to memorialize the massacre, Good Stab among them. Etsy wishes she could tell him how she stopped at Ackerman’s library earlier and destroyed Arthur’s original journal by pouring her father’s alkaline cremains over its acidic pages. Instead she raises a fist over her head in farewell to Arthur’s tormentor/confessor. He doesn’t return the salute. As he rides off after the other Blackfeet, Etsy sees a yellow hard hat hanging from his saddle. So he was the workman who found Arthur’s journal. The snowstorm swallows Good Stab. The nachzehrer’s gone—no, not the vampire. The Blackfeet. Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: All Arthur’s fussing about gluttony has been because of what he did once in hunger. This doesn’t stop him, as a prairie dog, from chewing on Etsy’s couch like a poorly trained puppy. What’s Cyclopean: The word of the day is “catachresis,” which is using an almost-right word—“mitigate” for “militate,” for example, or “Bouquet” for “Beaucarne.” The Degenerate Dutch: “I give myself permission… It’s what we white folk do.” Libronomicon: Among Etsy’s father’s few remaining possessions is a set of Zane Grey westerns. And an extremely awkward Bible being used as a file cabinet. Weirdbuilding: Etsy is deeply disappointed that her tresayle’s journal doesn’t reveal his fate. She was hoping, I suppose, for a revelatory “The window! The window!” Madness Takes Its Toll: Commit a description of vampiric giant prairie dogs to paper, and it may get you committed. Call 911 without any real explanation, and you’re hysterical, also in both senses of the word. Anne’s Commentary I had a feeling Good Stab might not kill Arthur outright, thus putting him beyond Good Stab’s not-so-tender mercies. The alternative, I figured, would be to make Arthur a nachzehrer, thus able to suffer for much if not all eternity on this earth, just in case the Christian Hell is a myth. Arthur doesn’t seem to have considered this possibility. Otherwise, he might have more strongly considered ruining Good Stab’s fun by committing suicide. Although I believe suicide is a mortal sin. Making it a bad choice if the Christian Hell is NOT a myth. Plus it’s a common superstition that suicides may become vampires, in which case Arthur would end up undead no matter what. Etsy Beaucarne has been whirling about in one of the lower circles of academic hell for a while, the one in which its victims are bedeviled by the dreaded tenure-and-promotions committee. Maybe she could take comfort in the thought that the committee’s Francophile member doesn’t know so much about French genealogical terms as she thinks she does. That, or I’ve messed up my reconstruction of Etsy’s reconstruction of her ancestral line. Here’s what I’ve got: Etsy Beaucarne, herself Etsy’s Dad, father Artemis (Flowers) Beaucarne, grandfather Arthur Flowers, great-grandfather Benjamin Flowers, great-great-grandfather Arthur Beaucarne, great-great-great grandfather Francophile Prof writes in her deleted but not lost comment that “Dr. E” might use the term “tresayle” instead of “great-great-great-grandfather” in referring to Arthur. Wiktionary gives this etymology for tresayle: “From Middle French trisayeul, from Latin tris, tres (“three”) + French aïeul (“grandfather”).” It defines the word as “a grandfather’s grandfather,” hence “a great-great-grandfather.” Not a “great-great-great-grandfather.” Etsy’s tresayle would then be Benjamin Flowers rather than Arthur Beaucarne. It looks like, in addition to the two greats in great-great-grandfather, you have to count the grand. That way you literally get three (tres) grandfathers (ayles.) The term for a great-great-great-grandfather is quatrayle, or the “grandfather of the grandfather of one’s father.” Four (quatr) grandfathers (ayles) would require three greats and a grand, or great-great-great-grandfather. Arthur Beaucarne, you old quatrayle, you. If you didn’t want all those descendants, you should have let Ada Murray use her “pessary,” an early twentieth century term for diaphragms and cervical caps. Instead you gave her some claptrap about how your “intended vocation” meant you couldn’t give her an STD, or presumably, a baby. What, were all Lutheran pastors-to-be fitted with male chastity belts, aka “penis cages.” Do an image-search on those beauties, hackers. Enough fun with words and on to everyone’s favorite mammalian order, the Rodentia. Or at least Goddess’s favorite mammalian order, if you go by number of species. Good Stab talked about putting himself through self-annihilation by eating so many “dirty faces” that he became a giant mouse himself. Either he never tried that undeath-style change, or he gave up and kept his Blackfeet form. Instead it’s Arthur who undergoes drastic rodentification, not to a giant mouse but to a giant prairie dog. Why a prairie dog? A black-tailed prairie dog, I conjecture, as it’s the more abundant species in Montana, with a more northern range than the white-tailed prairie dog. A keystone species, the prairie dog is a highly social animal, both on the “town” (colony) and the family levels. They have developed complex vocal communications, including an array of warning barks. A lone prairie dog would be an anxious and unhappy prairie dog. I’m assuming that Prairie Dog Arthur (PD-Arthur) would have been largely a solitary beast, interacting with other PDs only by dining on them. The more PD-like he became, the greater his torture would be, to long for his “natural” society while being forced to cannibalize on its members. That would be an emotional torture akin to what Good Stab has endured, an outcast forced to feed on Blackfeet in order to remain Blackfeet. See how you like it, Three-Persons, might have been his vengeful taunt. As a human who had largely isolated himself from his fellows, Arthur would probably have accepted this punishment as just, perhaps a Purgatorial trial. Perhaps volunteered to some degree. His only path back to a human form, a fully human mentality, would be to do as Good Stab does and feed on his former kind. In Blackfeet mythology, prairie dogs may be clever tricksters, as well as paragons of family and community. They feature in many stories about Good Stab’s friend, Napi. In spite of its title, “Bobcat and Birch Tree” has much to tell about a game in which the prairie dogs ultimately demonstrate their fellowship, while Napi is, well, ultimately Napi, charming but ever-hungry. Ultimately, Graham Jones’ novel has been for me a beautiful, stunning, harrowing ride. The ending is going to have to sit with me a while before I know what to make of it, but that’s fine. That’s the way of the best books. Ruthanna’s Commentary Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about. Last round I admitted my preference for weird bloody guts over mimetic ones. And here we are, with Etsy killing her giant prairie dog vampire tresayle with the fruits of a hardware store run, in the middle of a blizzard. Leading a giant prairie dog into the back of a clunker, trying to explain the whole thing to an unsympathetic property manager, dragging along a cat because she really does take after Arthur. That’s the stuff. Etsy is having a bad time of everything, even before the journal shows up. Her father’s dying, her career is dying, and her father would be horrified if he woke up long enough to find out about her career. The idea of creating a monograph from the journal is a wild hail Mary pass – she’s a communication studies prof, not an historian. It’s not her field. It’s just there. It’s the way academia doesn’t care about Life Happening, or the context from which you come, but is full of prejudicial practices that it doesn’t acknowledge because it couldn’t possibly have context and human limitations. (I once got a year added to my tenure clock for my wife’s medically complex pregnancy, then criticized for not using that year to work up extra publications.) So it’s no surprise that the journal drives her over the edge. She was expecting nice everyday history, admirable vocabulary, something to exploit and explain, and instead she gets this. There’s maybe a communications monograph to be gotten out of it – could it be treated as a parable? Lutheran pastor creates a fictional vampire story to illustrate how people engage with sin and (lack of) forgiveness? But she believes Arthur’s confession/absolution, if nothing else, and is in just the right (wrong) place to make his guilt her own. And, after all, the guilt for America’s genocidal campaigns against native nations is collective. She’s living on stolen land, that her ancestors helped to steal. (Why does Arthur label his own sections “absolution” and Good Stab’s “confession”? Is Good Stab not seeking absolution for his own guilt? Is Arthur not, reluctantly, confessing?) And finally, in Arthur’s last letter, Good Stab forcibly shares that ancestor’s very specific role in the theft. He was not another soldier caught up in diffusion of responsibility. He was studying to be a priest, riding along to study sin as if it were a spectator sport, and instead incited the sin with his own silver preacher’s tongue. He was hungry, drunk, frozen, desperate to return to the land of rations. He didn’t care whether they were at “the right camp,” and whispered murder in the ear of the one guy who might have cared. Thus his guilt at indulging in his parishioner’s food, not so much a distraction from his real sin as a symptom of it. He has murdered for gluttony before. Good Stab, then, turns Arthur into a fellow nachzehrer. Like his “mentor” Cat Man, he then feeds his victim into a punishing shape. In the process, it seems, he learns that eating mice wouldn’t end his own human suffering, but would simply turn him into a giant rodent. (Which means Cat Man is still out there somewhere as a miserable fish, hoping to get a bite of fisherman.) Perhaps that’s why, a century later, Good Stab’s still in fully human form, and has found ways to join with other Blackfeet in their ceremonies. Is he growing comfortable with his new nature, or—his vengeance done—will he now seek animalistic semi-oblivion? And how long will it take Arthur to grow back? His head is still down in that ravine, snapping. So nothing is really over—not the theft of land and life, not any of the three bloodsuckers, and not Etsy’s need to deal with the fallout of the past month. There’s no easy wrap-up. Just the continuing tangle of sin, and guilt, and confession, and inadequate absolution. Next week, we fail at tourism in Nadia Bulkin’s “Things to Know Before You Go.” You can find it in Silk and Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora. Then join us as we begin our new longread: H. G. Wells’s classic The Island of Dr. Moreau.[end-mark] The post ROUSes Abound: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 12) appeared first on Reactor.

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

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

Books Necessary Whimsy Finding Joy with Jimothy, Genre Hijinks, and Pushing Daisies Clever books, delightful comics, and the best TV show ever will always be here for you! By Lish McBride | Published on July 22, 2026 Witchlings cover art by Lissy Marlin Comment 1 Share New Share Witchlings cover art by Lissy Marlin I love the days where finding whimsy feels easy—where my curiosity is in the driver seat, steering me to the funny, weird things our world is full of. That doesn’t mean I’m doggedly looking for the bright side on those days or running around like a Disney princess singing to forest creatures or anything; I still see the bad stuff. I just see the wonder, too. Then there are the hard days, where I feel like a starving person licking the plate of whimsy for any stray crumb of joy or dollop of humor. The days where I’m overloaded and the world is a whole heck of a lot. Lately, it’s been a lot of “licking the empty plate” days. The humor has been on the darker edge of things. I mean, it’s really difficult not to make jokes when your headlines are almost entirely about diarrhea lettuce. You resort to gallows humor because otherwise you’re just thinking about how awful it must be for the people dealing with it and how it could have easily been avoided if the proper systems and protections had been left in place. And then there are the things that whimsy can’t touch. The grief tied to the constant news of people senselessly dying. The sudden loss of people who brought joy to so many, like Sam Neill. There’s been a lot of loss in my household this year and to see that pattern repeating in the outside world has felt like too much sometimes. So, I have to look to the small things. Literal crumbs of joy. Like a friend introducing you to a new kind of animal you’ve never heard of because they know it will fill you with delight. (Did the rest of you know that there is such a thing called a Grasshopper mouse, aka a werewolf mouse, that kills scorpions and howls?!?) Or like taking a walk after dinner and following the cheep cheep cheep noises until you spy a nest full of baby birds. It might be your DMs full of fan art and memes of Jimothy, your new local hometown folk hero. (Jimothy is a raccoon.) Even slipping into old, well-worn joys, like taking a moment to sit in a bookstore and read the first few pages of a new book. Licking the plate won’t fill your belly, but it will keep you going until you can, and sometimes, that’s enough. Here are some whimsical, delectable morsels that will see you through the week. If Books Could Kill by Kate Eberle I got to read this book early, so I’ve been sitting on this whimsy for months. The speculative element to this one is relatively small—Roxie makes an offhand wish to live in the next book of her favorite romcom writer, Anna Matthews. Roxie gets her wish, but unfortunately for her, Anna Matthews isn’t writing a romcom, she’s writing a thriller. Which Roxie quickly discovers when the handsome mystery man she has a date with tries to kill her. Had this been a romance novel, Roxie would have known what to do, but she has no idea how to navigate the tropes and structure of a thriller. She’s very lucky then that she accidentally kidnaps a professor who knows all about the genre. What follows is a delightfully funny madcap—and occasionally meta—adventure that lovingly plays with romance and thriller tropes alike. The House Saphir by Marissa Meyer I always want to be transparent and warn you when I’m horribly biased toward an author, and Marissa is one of them—we’ve known each other almost since we debuted. (I can’t really avoid authors I know at this point. I’ve been in the industry too long.) Okay, warning done, let’s talk about The House Saphir. Meyer’s style of whimsy isn’t the gag-a-minute type. Oh, there’s humor—in this one, which is a Bluebeard retelling, the ghosts of the murdered wives cracked me up a whole lot. I love the concept of a hypochondriac ghost. Mallory, the main character of our story, also has a lot of humor to her voice, mostly when she runs across a fact that she doesn’t find convenient and so discards it accordingly. However, the majority of the whimsy here comes from the world itself. The fanciful, fairytale landscape of strange magics, elaborate manors, and the charmingly handsome heir to a haunted estate. Meyer is often referred to as the “queen of fairytale retellings”, and it’s a crown that fits. She weaves a story together like a fairy godmother magicking up a carriage out of a pumpkin, so that even the darker elements have a sparkle to them. Witchlings by Claribel A. Ortega One of the hills I will defend forever is things can be funny and have whimsy and still have a content warning. If ever there were characters that needed humor and joy, it would be characters who have trauma. Kids know that traumatic things happen. Kids experience traumatic things. What they need are books showing them that those things can be defeated. *Throws glitter* Okay, so there are piles of amazing reviews for Witchlings, but do you know what my test is for middle grade books? …Do children like them? That’s it. That’s the test. Witchlings passed with flying colors and is a fan favorite amongst my own nieces and my friends’ kids. And who can blame them? There’s magic! Mystery! Friendship! Toads! There’s also a wonderful, tension-filled premise—what happens to you if you’re a young witch and you’re not sorted into the coven of your dreams? If you are—gasp—a spare, a witch with no coven and less-than powers? Well, you try to make you own coven, that’s what. And if that doesn’t work? You band together to take on an impossible task like defeating the Nightbeast, even if it means you all might end up being turned into toads. FOREVER. For a bonus, not only is the cover magical, but every chapter has an adorable illustration at the top! Bloodlust & Bonnets by Emily McGovern I first discovered McGovern’s work through the My Life as a Background Slytherin comics many years ago. Since then, she’s been a creator I’ve followed on Patreon for years. Her comics range from pop culture mayhem to thoughtful, but funny, autobiographical pieces. I’m always amazed how much emotion she’s able to convey with a fairly pared-down style of illustration. Bloodlust & Bonnets is what would happen in a Regency romance if the heroine decided it would much more fun to go vampire hunting instead. At times it’s wonderfully absurd, with a psychic eagle named Napoleon, a sentient castle, and a vampire that keeps trying to invite the heroine into her immortal vampire cult, only to be repeatedly interrupted by Lord Byron (from books!). It’s a wonderfully chaotic adventure full of beheadings, explosions, and three characters whose romantic lives become increasingly entangled. Pushing Daisies You know how everyone has a show they would trade a pint of blood for just to get it to come back? No? Is the blood thing just me? Well, whatever you would trade, Pushing Daisies is, rather ironically, the show I’d bring back from the dead in a heartbeat. As a series, it really shouldn’t have worked. First there was the somewhat macabre premise of a man, Ned, who can bring people back from the dead with one touch and helps a detective, played by Chi McBride, to solve crimes. Ned also uses those powers to revive fruit and make delicious pies. It’s all going along fine until Ned revives a woman and realizes it’s Chuck, his childhood crush. The catch? He can never, ever touch her again or she’ll be dead forever. It sounds depressing, but it’s not. Add in elements like a narrator (Jim Dale!), quirky characters (like the aunts with their cheese fridge), musical numbers, a bright color palette, and a sweetheart of a love story, and it sounds over the top. And maybe it is, but in the best possible way. It always felt like every single element of the show was carefully curated. The cast? Perfect. (It took me years to stop calling Lee Pace “The Piemaker.”) The concept? A gem. And the writing? *Swoon* I often wonder if the show was just a little too unique and quirky for the mainstream. Would it do better now, with streaming services? Who knows. It was one of the many wonderful projects that Bryan Fuller came up with early on that didn’t get as far as they should have. (I will forever be salty that his reboot of The Munsters called Mockingbird Lane never made it past the pilot. We could have had Suzy Eddie Izzard as Grandpa Munster, you cowards!) If you’ve never seen Pushing Daisies, I highly recommend it. If you have, maybe it’s time for a rewatch.[end-mark] The post Finding Joy with Jimothy, Genre Hijinks, and <i>Pushing Daisies</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News The End of Oak Street It’s Not a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood in the Latest Trailer for The End of Oak Street It’s 10 pm. Do you know which dinosaurs are eating your children? By Molly Templeton | Published on July 22, 2026 Screenshot: Warner Bros. Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Warner Bros. Just when you thought we had finally passed through the era of haunted-child versions of songs in movie trailers, along comes the new The End of Oak Street trailer, which features a child singing an eerie version of The Flintstones theme. This might have been sort of funny if the trailer had let us simply infer that the suburban Platt family was, you know, in the past, but no: a few seconds later, one of the unfortunate Platt children asks, “We’re in the past, aren’t we?” Were the dinosaurs a giveaway? The End of Oak Street asks, What if your neighborhood were mysteriously up and moved to an era where dinosaurs roamed the planet? I feel moderately confident that the answer would be “You all get eaten,” but the Platts have sledgehammers and shotguns and if the trailer is anything to go by, a modicum of practicality not shared by their neighbors, many of whom get chomped. They also have a dog, and yes, the dog is going to fight a dinosaur, and no, I will not be watching this film, but you do you, friends. Trailers for this film were a bit more appealing when they only hinted at the presence of large predators—and small, Twinkie (?)-stealing ones, which are much more endearing. Now, we get dinosaurs AND an abrupt slice through the earth under the neighborhood, which really does seem to have been picked up and time-traveled. Perhaps there is a very interesting how and why portion of this film, and the dinosaurs are only part of it? The End of Oak Street stars Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, both wearing clothes that are clearly of another era. (The Flintstones premiered in 1960, but this looks a decade or two later to me.) Their children are played by Maisy Stella and Christian Convery. The movie is written and directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows). You too can visit the street that time forgot really messed with on August 14.[end-mark] The post It’s Not a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood in the Latest Trailer for <i>The End of Oak Street</i> appeared first on Reactor.