Movies & TV Star Wars: Maul — Shadow Lord It’s Been a Strange and Winding Road to Arrive at Maul — Shadow Lord But the first season is still worth every second. By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on May 5, 2026 Credit: Lucasfilm Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Lucasfilm There are many versions of me who want to talk about Maul — Shadow Lord. There’s the critic version, who has largely felt that the best Star Wars media for the past couples decades have been the animated shows created by Dave Filoni and a slew of talented creatives. There’s the lifelong Star Wars fan, who enjoys nothing so much as filling in character arc gaps. There’s also the twelve-year-old version of me, hanging out under layers of my psyche, who is both stunned and elated at this turn of events—that guy? The one-off baddie who spoke two sentences, used entirely for (gorgeous) fight choreography, and summarily discarded before the end of Episode I? He’s… one of my favorites now? It took a lot to get here, okay? For both the character, and for me. I had a “Jedi vs. Sith” poster on my wall as a kid, featuring Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, and Maul. That film-ending fight was built up to an unnerving degree prior to The Phantom Menace’s release: The piece of music that heralded its arrival—the “Duel of the Fates”—was treated like a pop single, bequeathed to a desperate hoard of fans in the lead-up. It still holds its place as an iconic piece of soundtrack music that effectively showcases everything Star Wars is best at. (Star Wars is a story told almost entirely through music and visuals, but that’s a talk for another time.) The film came and went, and rather than Darth Maul being made into a villain for the ages, he was cast off. Same with Count Dooku in Round II. General Grievous in Round III. It made sense from a narrative standpoint, of course: They were all Palpatine’s “prototypes,” as it were. He was waiting for Anakin, and used other apprentices in the meantime to achieve his ends, built up and discarded with no remorse. But films aren’t particularly long mediums—even the longer ones are still giving a fraction of the story allotted by television or books—and the Star Wars prequels were stuffed to their proverbial gills with characters, places, and ideas. Those prototype villains barely got a breath of air before landing in the bin. Either you hated the prequels for serving up a lavishly coursed meal and taking away each dish after a single bite, or you did the fandom thing—you searched for more. There were books and comics and even fanfic to satiate… and then The Clone Wars series arrived.  Credit: Lucasfilm I scoffed when I heard they were bringing Maul back. Oh, sure, I thought, let’s just do the superhero thing, where no one has the ability to die, and no consequences stick. But my curiosity (and a certain amount of homesickness) got the better of me, and when I broke, I stumbled into some of the best Star Wars stories we’ve got. The Clone Wars was designed to fill in the gaps left by the prequels and in many ways surpasses them because it had enough room to tell the entire story—every explanation required can be found there. Among those explanations were further arcs for all three discarded apprentices: Grievous, a useful but tragic puppet, making up for his lack of thought with brute force. Dooku, who believed himself cleverer than everyone else, full of gravitas that cannot save him. And Maul… abused and molded by multiple masters, a prophet who no one will heed. He blames everything on Obi-Wan Kenobi, of course. But there’s care in that hatred, a closeness that Maul is desperate to make sense of—they are the same. Unfavored apprentices who did what was expected of them, both cast aside in favor of Anakin Skywalker’s sparkling midichorian count. Throughout The Clone Wars and Rebels, we see Maul’s repeated attempts to warn people of the evil Palpatine poses, but he doesn’t have enough of the full picture to bring the allies he desires over to his side. Then the release of Solo threw a curveball: for some unfathomable reason, Maul was in charge of a sizable portion of the entire underworld in their galaxy, for a time. Sure, I guess. Just make him a mob boss for the sake of a pointless shock cameo. This was additionally a bit silly because, well… Rebels had already shown us how Maul died. (It’s a gorgeous death, and if you haven’t yet watched it, I highly recommend it. The episode is called “Twin Suns.”) But there were technically a few years in the interim, so the animated shows did what they always do: The started to explain it. The introduction to Maul’s rise as underworld overlord began in the revived and final season of The Clone Wars, where we learn that he has installed himself as the leader of Mandalore’s Death Watch—yes, the group who eventually form the cult that raises Din Djarin—and destroyed various criminal bosses to consolidate a different kind of power. They made it work, as they always have. Credit: Lucasfilm And now they mean to do one better: They’ve given Maul a story entirely his own. This has been a long time coming, thanks to the work of several separate series and the impact of one actor—not Ray Park, who embodied Maul’s physical form in live-action, or Peter Serafinowicz, who offered up those sparse bits of dialogue on film, but Sam Whitwer. Whitwer has played Maul for the entire run of animated shows, and it’s his performance that has molded the character into someone formidable and worthy of an entire series to himself. He has been given some incredibly fun material to work with—Maul out of his mind and alone, Maul agonized and vengeful and sitting on your doorstep, a once-quiet character now showing that he has a penchant for monologuing—and has never wasted a fragment of it. He has infused every breath with operatic pathos, making it impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. To that end, Maul is going on a somewhat familiar journey in Shadow Lord: Yes, he’s going to gain control of Crimson Dawn, but he’s also found himself an apprentice. Well, not found. He kinda coerced a bunch and also let her Jedi Master perish. But for a Dark Side user, that’s basically a totally coincidental discovery! And, you know, you’ve got to become some kind of reluctant dad in Star Wars. It’s good for you, probably.  Maul — Shadow Lord takes place in the early days of the Empire (unclear how early, timeline-wise, though we know it’s well before the events of Solo and Rebels), when everyone is getting used to the new status quo and trying their best not to attract the new regime’s attention. As Maul is on Janix, working with a few allies from Mandalore and Dathomir to begin his underworld takeover, he comes across Devon Izara (Gideon Adlon) and her master Eeko-Dio Daki (Dennis Haysbert). Maul is certain that he and Devon are linked and destined to be important to one another; as the two enter each other’s orbits, they’re also being circled by Brander Lawson (Wagner Moura), a cop who doing a terrible job raising his son after he and his wife split up for totally understandable reasons: She joined the Empire. (Not gonna start thinking about how many relationships that ended.) Credit: Lucasfilm Despite all attempts to keep the Empire away from Janix, they are eventually called thanks to Lawson’s unfortunately lawful-good aligned partner, Two Boots (Richard Ayoade), not understanding fascism at all. The whole group are eventually forced to work together and trust one another in order to escape the planet, with Inquisitors and stormtroopers hot on a their trail. The fight choreography is gorgeous, and very thoughtful in its styles and execution. Force-users all have favored forms in lightsaber combat, and the best sequences animate these choices as a way of cluing the viewer into emotional states. The Kiner family is back on music duty, and the operatic vibes never let up. It’s a slow-moving season, but I appreciate that decision more than I can say—in an era where television rarely gets enough time to unspool, it’s particularly enjoyable to watch an entire season (even a 10-episode one) center on a single question: What will bring Devon around to Maul’s teachings? While this is going on, Maul is busy trying to work through multiple stages of loss and abandonment all in one go, because he can’t do anything the easy way, of course. He’s also harboring an injury to his robot leg that is a wonderful stand-in for both aged aches and pains, and the genuine disability he has harbored since being fully cut in half by Obi-Wan when he was, like, 22. (Are there separate thoughts here about the fact that mechanical replacement parts still cause their user to feel pain in this universe when they malfunction? Hoo boy, you bet, but that’s also a talk for another time.) You’ve got to be proud of the guy for all his massive personal flaws—he actually manages some effective self-therapy later in the season, realizing that he might have to stop rejecting the “weakness” of his inner child and start protecting him. Might be useful for a guy about to gain an apprentice of his own. Credit: Lucasfilm Devon Izara is more than a worthy foil to Maul in all of this, and part of the enjoyment at watching this series unfold is similar to the enjoyment to be had in shows like Andor: We know this partnership ultimately doesn’t work out between them, but we don’t know why. And there are so many ways for a catastrophic fallout between the two to go… but we’ve got to watch them get close first. We’ve got to maximize the pain for everyone involved, and see Devon struggle with this path. She’s full of rage, certainly—anyone who’s ever been a teenage girl knows the drill—but deeply loving at the same time. Despite the desire to see this relationship form and change them both, it’s in service of a devastating conclusion.  What? Maul’s mental instability has fully reasserted itself by Rebels. Whatever is coming, it’s about to break him all over again—losing an apprentice he fought so hard to win and a criminal empire on top of it? The potential betrayals already stacking in a corner? This is the beginning of the end, and we get to watch the whole wreck pile up… hopefully. I’m glad to know that Maul — Shadow Lord will have at least one more season, but who knows what will emerge beyond it. All I know is, these animated series continue to be the place where Star Wars is doing all its best work. They are perfectly suited to the task at hand, and powered by artists who love the world. It doesn’t get much better.[end-mark] The post It’s Been a Strange and Winding Road to Arrive at <i>Maul — Shadow Lord</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Time Travel Read an Excerpt From The Traveler by Joseph Eckert A reluctant time-traveler, his extraordinary son, and the bond between them that even millennia cannot break… By Joseph Eckert | Published on May 5, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Traveler by Joseph Eckert, a time travel adventure full of heartbreak, hope, and futures beyond imagination, publishing with Tor Books on June 9th. It’s a day like any other when Scott Treder first jumps forward through time. One moment, he’s on his way to work, fingers drumming the steering wheel. The next, he’s tumbling headlong down the road, his car gone, a dozen panicked voicemails from his wife waiting on his cell.7:51am. Monday, April 13th.A blink of an eye.7:52am. Tuesday, April 14th.An entire 24 hours, gone.This one moment—this first spontaneous slip—marks a change in the course not only of Scott’s future, but that of the world. From this point on, at precisely 7:52am every morning, Scott inexplicably travels forward in time in ever-doubling intervals. First one day lost in a blink, then two, then four, until weeks, even years, are passing him by in an instant.Meanwhile, his wife is left alone to pick up the pieces of the life they once shared together, and, before long, Lyle, Scott’s genius seven-year-old son, will surpass him in age.Because while his dad is rocketing forward in time, Lyle is growing up–graduating early, studying at Berkeley, becoming the foremost scholar of quantum physics, all in an attempt to bring his father back… CHAPTER 1 I was driving to work the first time it happened. It was a chilly April morning in Madison, Wisconsin, the sun peering over the rooftops in my neighborhood. I was running a little late, but not much more than usual. A sports podcast played in the background, although I wasn’t really listening. I was just driving. One more day, one more morning, like any other. I had a headache. It had pulsed behind my eyes since I’d gotten up, but it was getting steadily worse. Then, for less than a single heartbeat, the world slipped and my car disappeared. For a fraction of a moment, I was still moving forward, a little over the posted twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, in a sitting position, one arm up, fingers of my right hand curled in a circle where the steering wheel had been. Knees bent; one foot extended to feather a gas pedal that was no longer there. Then I fell, gravity pulling my poised position apart. My feet hit the pavement first, then my rear end, then my knees as I cartwheeled forward. I tumbled across the rough asphalt, arms and legs flailing, my buttoned-up Oxford shirt and khaki pants tearing like paper. I didn’t even have time to cry out. One moment I was in my car, the next I was rolling across the roadway. I flung my arms up to cover my head as I curled in a ball. The ground hammered into my back, my sides, my thighs, my knees, my shoulders. I tumbled a dozen yards before I came to a stop, my cheek pressed against the road. The double yellow center line extended away from me, bright against the rough pattern of the asphalt. Before me was the rust-etched underside of a parked car. I couldn’t breathe, and I felt panic rise before a clear thought made it through the muddle in my head and I forced myself to breathe in. Cold air flooded into empty lungs. I coughed, sucked more air in, and groaned. “What—” A horn blared, tires screeched, and a black truck—therehadn’t been anyone behind me—swerved around my outstretched feet before roaring past. The driver shouted something at me as he went by, but I didn’t catch the words. I jerked up and crab-walked backward until my wrists hit the curb. I pulled myself onto the concrete sidewalk, moving on adrenaline, and fell to my back. I stared at drifting clouds in the bright morning sky. The wind had drawn them into a broad wing shape, framed by trees and powerlines on either side of the street. I raised trembling hands, my heart hammering in my chest. The heels of my palms were bloody patches dotted with rocks and bits of asphalt. Everything hurt. Blood trickled down my calves from my knees. “What the hell?” I croaked. I heard the scrape of someone’s shoes on the concrete to my left. I turned my head and felt a spike of pain as the muscles in my neck seized up. Two young girls wearing identical backpacks stared wide-eyed down at me. They turned, looked at one another, then pelted down the sidewalk away from me. “Mom! Mom!” one of them screamed. I opened my mouth to call out and ask them what they’d seen, if they knew where my car was, but my phone started buzzing in my pants pocket. I fumbled with shaking hands and pulled it out. The screen was cracked in three new places. I held it against the backdrop of the sky and squinted. I had dozens of missed texts and several voicemails. I checked the texts, my thumb going to them by reflex. The first was from my officemate, Andy. “Dude. You coming in today or what?” I could only frown at the phone and shake my head, the concrete rough beneath my hair. I swiped to the next. This was from my supervisor, Melissa. “Scott. It had better be an emergency. You can’t just not show up for work. You have to call in.” I flipped through the rest, all variations on the same theme. I shifted to the voicemails. All were from Amy, my wife. I listened to the first while reading the automatically generated transcript, the little bubble moving across the screen to mark the passage of time as she spoke. “Scott, where are you?” Amy asked. “The police called me. They said you hit a parked car, and you left the Honda there, with the keys still in it and the engine running? Jesus, Scott. I mean, what did you do, just—just walk away or something? Call me when you get this. This is so bizarre.” The next one was from her, too. “Scott. I had to leave school and drive to Winslet to deal with the police. The Honda’s a wreck. It cost two hundred dollars to get it towed, and I had to give our insurance information to that lady whose car you hit. Her parked car you hit. I called your office, and your boss said you didn’t show up for work. Where are you?” Amy again. “Scott? Just—just give me a call, okay? I’m not mad, I just want to know what happened, and if you’re okay. Call me.” The last one was from her, too, and she sounded like she’d been crying. “Scott. Jesus. It’s half past nine at night. Where are you? Lyle’s beside himself. I’m—I’m worried. Call me. Or come home.” I pulled myself up until I sat on the curb. I gazed at my torn pants and dirty, bloody shirt. I held the phone up again. The time read 7:52 AM, which was fine. The smaller letters beneath those read Tuesday, April 14. That was not fine. It was April 13. It was Monday, April 13. I knew it. I knew it was April 13. But those little glowing white letters, plastered over the photo of Amy and my son, Lyle, hugging in front of a carousel, said otherwise. “What the hell?” I said again. I glanced around, but apart from the occasional passing car and an elderly woman walking a dog a couple blocks down, there was no one around. I thumbed through the contacts and speed-dialed my wife’s phone. She picked up on the first ring. “Scott?” “Amy, I—” “Scott, what the hell? Where have you been?” Her voice rose several octaves in the few seconds it took her to rush through the words. “Amy, I don’t know what’s going on, one second I’m driving to work, the next I’m—” “Where are you?” I rubbed my head and frowned as I pulled a sharp pebble from the skin above my eyebrow. “I’m on Winslet. I don’t know, midway down?” “I’m coming to get you. Stay there.” “Aren’t you at work?” “I took the day off. Lyle, he—Jesus, Scott.” She paused. “Where have you been?” “Amy, honestly, I was driving and then the car, it was gone…” “The car was gone? What does that mean?” “Exactly like it sounds. One second, I’m driving, then I’m…” “Then you were what, Scott?” “Just—just come get me.” I heard her breathing. In the background, I heard my son’s voice asking if she was talking to Dad. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.” “Thanks, honey. I love—” She hung up before I could get the words out. I sighed and slipped the phone into my pocket and, stifling a groan, began the slow process of picking myself off the sidewalk. I managed to stand without doing any more damage to my skin or my clothes. I tried to brush off my pants and shirt without letting my fingers touch the raw scrapes. “Hey, you okay, mister?” I turned and winced as the muscles in my neck protested. A teenage boy had pulled up on a bike. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder. His jaw worked as he chewed gum. “Yeah, I’m all right.” “Shit, dude, you don’t look all right.” He blew a bubble of gum, popped it, and kept chewing. “In fact, you look like shit. You need an ambulance or something?” “No, I’m fine. My wife’s coming to pick me up.” He cocked his head. “This neighborhood gets weirder every day.” I rubbed at the muscles in my neck. They were knots of rope, tightening under my fingers. “Why do you say that?” The teenager jerked a thumb down the road. “Yesterday, I seen this car, right around here, nobody in the driver’s seat, just cruisin’ down the road. I watched it go maybe a half a block before—” He raised his hands, made one into a fist, and slammed it into the palm of the other. “Wham, you know? Hits this parked car.” “Yesterday, huh?” “Yeah, right around this time, too.” He looked at his watch. “Shit, I gotta get to school. You sure you’re all right?” “I’m all right.” “Okay. You keep tellin’ yourself that, man. Maybe it’ll come true.” He rode away before I could think of a reply. I stood there, picking rocks out of my skin, until Amy rolled up in the minivan. She stepped out of the driver’s side. My son was in the back seat, his nose pressed against the window. The thick lenses of his glasses made his eyes look tiny and far away. His mouth was open. “God, Scott.” Amy came around the front of the minivan. Her dark eyes, identical to Lyle’s, were bloodshot. She’d tied her hair in a bun behind her head, and she wore sweatpants and one of my T-shirts. “Um, hey,” I said, and felt stupid. “How are you?” She stopped a pace before me and looked me up and down. I could tell from her expression how terrible I must look. “What… what happened?” I raised my arms a little, thinking to hug her. Fresh pain pulsed from the scrapes at the movement, cloth sliding across torn skin, and I winced. Something in the set of her shoulders made me stop and lower my hands. She didn’t want me to hug her, not at that moment. “I don’t know, honey. I really don’t. One second, I was driving to work, the next, the car’s gone, and I’m rolling down the street.” She bit her lip, furrows creasing her forehead. “Did you get thrown out of the car or something?” “I—Can we just go home? Please?” She chewed on her lip and glanced back at the minivan and Lyle. He watched us with his intense eyes, unblinking. She looked back at me and took me by the shoulder. She guided me off the sidewalk like I was an old man. Or a crazy person. “Daddy?” Lyle asked as I clambered into the passenger seat. It had been a long time since he’d called me “Daddy.” “Hey, bud,” I said, turning carefully in the seat to meet my son’s eyes. “How ya doing?” “Dad, where’d you go? You didn’t come home last night.” Amy opened the driver’s side door and got in. She started the engine, glancing sideways at me. “I’m not sure, buddy,” I said, keeping one eye on Amy. “I’m trying to figure that one out myself.” “Are you really okay, Dad?” Amy looked into the rearview mirror, frowning at the change in Lyle’s tone. He did this, sometimes, catching us off guard. One minute he was a normal, albeit quiet and bookish, seven-year-old kid. Then he’d say something so adult it threw us. His affect changed. Even the way he looked at us changed. I once asked my own father about it, if he’d ever experienced anything like that with me, during one of the rare occasions we had something approaching a civilized conversation. He just shrugged, distracted as always, and said kids were weird. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, bud, I’m okay.” Lyle sat back in his seat. I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile and not a frightening grimace and turned around in my seat, stifling a groan. We drove for the next few blocks, Amy glancing over at me or up in the mirror at Lyle every few seconds. I tried not to move, tried not to let out any sound as we went over bumps. I looked sideways at Amy, catching glimpses of her in the corner of my eye. I was usually pretty good at reading her. Better than most people, her sister included. But I couldn’t read her now. Buy the Book The Traveler Joseph Eckert Buy Book The Traveler Joseph Eckert Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget I took a breath. Steeled myself. “Amy.” She held the steering wheel so tight the tendons in her hands stood out. “Yes.” “Is it—is it the fourteenth? It’s Tuesday?” Her lips drew into a line. She met my gaze for a second, her eyes wide. “Yes, Scott. It’s the fourteenth.” I nodded and put my head back against the seat. We didn’t speak the rest of the way to the duplex. My Honda was in my half of the driveway. It didn’t look too bad, considering. The passenger-side front was a little mangled, but it looked drivable. I wasn’t looking forward to the repair bill. It was obvious to everyone, including my insurance, that I was at fault. Amy walked before me up the steps and let Lyle into the house. He disappeared into his room before I’d closed the front door. “Shouldn’t he be at school?” I asked. “I took the day off, so I let him take the day off, too.” She took a breath. “Come on.” She walked toward our bedroom. I followed her, grimacing at each step. In our room, Amy rounded the bed, heading for the master bathroom. She knelt and got cotton pads and a bar of soap from under the sink. When she stood, her brow remained furrowed as she looked at me. She stepped back to give me space. There was a battered version of myself in the mirror. I looked, if it was possible, even worse than I felt. I started to unbutton my shirt, peeling sticky fabric from the bloody splotches across my skin. “We need to talk about this,” she said. “Yeah.” I got my shirt halfway off. I took a long look at myself. I’d torn a ragged strip of skin from my chin, revealing raw, exposed flesh beneath. There was a deeper gash on my forehead, just above my eyebrow. The top of my left ear oozed blood. The rest of my body was worse. I was lucky I hadn’t broken anything. I’d been going, what, twenty-seven, twenty-eight miles per hour when the car vanished? And I was lucky the truck hadn’t hit me. The truck that hadn’t been behind me a second earlier. I stopped. I leaned against the sink, staring into my own bloodshot eyes. I took in a breath, the air cool on my lips and tongue, and let it back out in a shuddering wave that shook my whole body. What was going on? Was I going crazy? “Scott.” Amy’s voice cut through my thoughts. She sounded like she’d said it more than once. “Yes,” I said, my voice distant to my own ears. I tried to take the shirt the rest of the way off. I grimaced as a large patch of cloth clung to the pinkish meat under the scraped-off skin. The torn fabric had pressed into the wound. Pulling it out felt like dragging needles through exposed nerve endings. “God,” Amy said. “Here.” She took the shirt and worked the edges when the fabric stuck to my bloodied skin. She was firm but gentle, and she did a better job than I’d been doing. When the shirt was clear she stood back and watched as I pulled my khakis off one leg at a time. “Scott, you need to talk to me. I mean—what happened? You disappear for a day and show up like this, looking like you got in a fight with a mountain lion. A fight you clearly lost, you—” I glanced at her in the mirror, hearing the shift in her tone. She trembled. I turned and grasped her shoulders. She went rigid in my hands, then allowed me to pull her close. Her hair felt soft against my chest, one of the few places on my upper body that wasn’t covered in cuts and scrapes. “Honey. Honey, I wasn’t in a fight. No mountain lions were involved. None were in the vicinity, I swear. Not even a big house cat.” The tiniest hint of a smile quirked at the edges of her mouth. “I don’t know what happened,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I do know, okay? But it… it’s going to sound crazy.” She pushed back. “Tell me.” I let my arms fall. I turned back to the sink and started washing the scrapes and cuts with a washcloth as I spoke. The water in the sink turned a brackish pink from blood and bits of gravel. Talking distracted me from the sting. A little. “I was driving to work like every other morning.” I struggled to keep my tone even. Felt around the edges of what I was saying and what Amy needed to hear. Prodded at the truth even as I spoke. “Everything was normal. I was running late, but nothing too bad.” “And this was yesterday?” I hesitated, glancing at myself in the mirror again, as if my reflection would have the answer. It didn’t feel like it had been yesterday. It felt like it’d been half an hour ago. “Yes. Anyway. I was driving down Winslet.” I winced as I rubbed some pebbles and dirt out of a raw patch on my shoulder. They rattled down the curved porcelain of the sink. “Then the car disappeared.” “What does that even mean, Scott? You said that before. It doesn’t make sense.” “I know. I know it doesn’t make sense. But that’s what happened. One second, I’m driving, the next I’m in midair, a foot off the ground, still going twenty-five miles an hour. Must’ve rolled half a football field before I stopped. Then I almost got hit by a truck.” “And that’s what all this is from?” Amy motioned at my body. “Yes.” I rubbed the dirty scrapes, wincing every time the rough cloth touched broken skin. Amy stared at me. “Okay, Scott. Assuming that’s true, that was yesterday morning. These look fresh. Like they happened twenty minutes ago.” “Yes. Exactly.” “What?” I turned. “Amy. Honey. When the car disappeared, when I stopped rolling, I thought it was still the thirteenth. I thought it was still Monday morning. The rest of Monday never happened, not for me. One second, it’s Monday, the next, it’s Tuesday.” The worry lines were back. Amy stood next to the bathtub and was very still. “Say something,” I said. I almost smiled. “Anything.” “Did you hit your head, Scott? When you were in the accident?” I didn’t feel like smiling anymore. I faced the mirror again. “I don’t think so.” “I think we should take you to see a doctor.” “I’m okay. These all look worse than they really are.” “I’m not talking about the scrapes, Scott.” I rinsed the washcloth and started on another patch of bloody skin. “Yeah. I know.” “I’m going to call Dean’s, see if there’s anyone available to see you this morning. You should call work. Tell them you were in an accident, that you won’t be in today, either.” I nodded. She stood for a second, watching me. She reached out and touched my bare shoulder, on a part of skin that wasn’t torn up. She did it gently, carefully. Like stroking a wild animal. “I’ll call Dean’s.” “All right.” She gave me another searching look, then walked out of the bathroom, pulling the door shut as she went. I stopped dabbing my wounds and stared at myself in the mirror again, leaning forward until I was inches away. My own hazel-blue eyes, bloodshot and haggard, revealed nothing. “You’re fine,” the doctor said as he shouldered his way through the door, one arm balancing his laptop. “Apart from all the abrasions and dermal contusions, of course. You’ll want to keep those clean and use a topical antibiotic to prevent infection. Over the counter should do, although I can give you a prescription if you prefer.” I sat on the examination table, the thin, crinkly paper rough and cold under my bare legs. Amy perched on the bench next to the doctor’s desk. Lyle sat next to her, legs hanging off his seat, his intense eyes taking in his surroundings. “The X-rays all came back negative,” the doctor said. He pulled the swivel chair from under the desk and sat, glancing at me over the top of his reading glasses. “No fractures, no broken bones.” “What about a concussion?” Amy asked. “No sign of a concussion, either.” “What about this, this missing day, or whatever?” “Well, Mrs. Treder, again, your husband appears perfectly healthy apart from the cuts and bruises. We might see something more serious with an MRI—” “More serious?” Amy asked, straightening. “Like a tumor?” Lyle took this all in with his usual calm, his eyes flicking between the doctor, me, and Amy. “I wouldn’t want to speculate, Mrs. Treder,” the doctor said. “But I doubt we’d find anything. Your husband’s health record is clear, and he’s had no other symptoms.” Amy sat back and blew out a long breath. The doctor turned to me. “So, you can’t remember yesterday, is that correct?” “Yes.” “And this memory loss started after the accident?” “I—” I looked at Amy. “Yes.” The doctor raised his eyebrows but didn’t push further. Instead, he stood. “I think you’re fine. The memory loss may be temporary and stem from the shock of the accident. It can surprise people. Even minor fender benders can be terrifying. And you certainly took some knocks. If you want, I can refer you to a psychologist for an evaluation.” “No, thank you, that’s okay.” “Okay. You can get dressed, Mr. Treder. Feel free to take aspirin for any discomfort in the next few weeks. And the antibiotics?” “Thanks, I’ll get some aspirin and Neosporin at the pharmacy.” I stood, shook the doctor’s hand, and he left the room. Amy didn’t say anything as I dressed. She met my gaze. “I’ll get the van.” Her eyes flicked to Lyle. I caught the motion and gave her a tiny nod. “Thanks.” Lyle and I watched her leave. I turned to Lyle. “Ready to go, bud?” “What happened, Dad?” I crouched to his level. “Bud. I don’t know for sure. But I’ll tell you the truth. I was driving to work yesterday morning. Then, in an instant, in an eyeblink, it was today, this morning. The car was gone, but I was still traveling as fast as I’d been when I was driving. I got all these”—I held one arm up and nodded at the bandages scattered over my skin—“from falling on the road.” He studied me a moment. “Okay, Dad.” He hopped off the chair and walked out. I bit my lip and remained crouched there, reviewing what I’d said to him and his simple acceptance of something so outlandish. I was struck, not for the first time, that I might not have much time left to enjoy that side of him, that childish belief in his father’s authority and infallibility. He was seven already, seven going on thirty it seemed sometimes, and soon enough he’d be an adolescent and informing me in no uncertain terms how much of a fool he thought I was. I’d certainly let my father have it when I’d been a teenager. He’d deserved it—even growing up and becoming a father myself hadn’t changed my mind on that score. But I couldn’t bear the thought of my gentle and trusting Lyle doing that to me. I stood, grimacing, and followed him. When we got home, Amy changed clothes and asked if I wanted to take Lyle to the park. I was stiff and sore, and I wanted to do some investigating of my own, so I told them to go ahead without me. Amy touched my shoulder as Lyle got his shoes on. “Take it easy, okay? Just focus on getting better.” “I will.” Lyle gave me a tight hug before they left. I made myself some coffee and sat in front of the computer. Time to figure things out. I entered “missing time” into Google. Aside from blows to the head, the top result was stranger than I had imagined: alien abduction. I was admittedly a little more credulous than I would have been two days ago, but still, the idea that I was snatched out of my car and deposited, traveling the exact same direction and speed, exactly twenty-four hours later by some advanced species from the stars was ridiculous. Although, if the websites I perused were to be believed, I was dealing with utterly impenetrable alien psychology. I moved on. I uncovered other, potentially more reasonable, explanations. One cause of missing time was multiple personality disorder. Another possibility was syncope, or fainting, often caused by low oxygen levels, hypertension, or extreme exercise. None could explain how I ended up traveling twenty-five miles per hour through the air with no car. Overindulgence in alcohol was another potential and no doubt common cause of a blackout. Again, unlikely. The blackout would have to have been retroactive, assuming I started drinking later in the day. I hadn’t slipped vodka into my orange juice that morning. And I wasn’t much of a drinker. I never had been. Two stiff drinks and I was asleep on the couch. I sat back and put my hands behind my head. I stared at the off-white spackled ceiling. I was forgetting something. My Honda. It had crashed into a parked car without me at the wheel. Twenty-four hours later, I fell out of the air. I took a deep breath, let it out in a long rush, and closed the unhelpful billion-plus entries on “missing time.” CHAPTER 2 Amy was quieter than normal for the rest of the day. I knew not to rush her. She needed to process things at her own pace. She always had. After they returned from the park, I spent time with Lyle. We had an early dinner, then he and I retired to my “den”—the spare bedroom—and read. It was one of our favorite things to do. Our routine was well established. He sat in one recliner, nearly disappearing into the overstuffed cushions, and I sat in the one next to him. A small desk with a reading lamp sat between us. We read, me with my book, him with his. In minutes he was deep in a novel most librarians would have pegged at many times beyond the reading ability of a seven-year-old boy. Today it was Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, culled from my shelves of heavily worn paperbacks. I had never been much of a reader. My parents hadn’t read books. We spent dinners in my youth eating off TV trays and watching sitcoms. I moved away from television and toward film in my teens, going to the theater at least weekly with my friends to escape our respective houses. Even later, in college and beyond, Amy and I typically spent our evenings watching a movie from my ever-growing collection. But after Lyle came along and after we started to understand his gifts, Amy showed me the research on how parental reading encouraged children to read and how important reading was to expand a child’s mind and help them understand the world. I pivoted. I became a fixture at the local used bookstores, of which Madison had many, and shifted the money I might’ve spent on movies to picking up books for Lyle and me. I gave away or sold old DVDs and Blu-rays to make shelf space for books. I never gave up on movies, of course, and I had a whole list of ones I wanted to watch with Lyle when he was old enough. But I cherished this nightly reading time with him. As Lyle churned through Crichton’s world of genetic engineering and business interests gone awry, I tried to read a popular nonfiction account of Lincoln’s presidency, a book I’d missed back when it had been on the bestseller list. My mind kept wandering. I found myself staring at my son in the soft light, watching as his eyes skimmed along the pages behind his thick glasses. My whole body hurt, even with the aspirin, and I kept shifting in my seat to keep from pressing on one injury too long. Even so, Lyle never looked up, never appeared aware of my frequent glances or my constant fidgeting. He was amazing. This full-fledged person Amy and I had conjured into being. A little human, product of a miracle of nature so commonplace we never gave it a second thought. But now, after displacing an entire day, I was reminded forcibly of how miraculous he was to me. Funny how getting your life briefly knocked off-kilter could cause you to reevaluate things right in front of you. At eight o’clock, Amy appeared and announced it was time for Lyle to go to bed. Lyle looked up, blinked at her, and nodded, solemn as ever. He never complained. Amy regarded me in the doorway after he’d left. “Remember anything yet?” “Nothing new.” She hesitated, just enough for me to sense it. “All right.” She took a deep breath, her eyes tracking over the bandages on my face and hands. “Come to bed, okay?” “Right.” She gazed at me a moment longer and walked out. I rubbed my eyes and let out another long breath. Then I stood and shut off the light. Amy made pancakes the next morning. A rare treat. It was the day of the week I took Lyle to school, Gifted and Talented day, where he and other gifted students met before class and took on more challenging coursework. On non–Gifted and Talented mornings, Lyle took the bus to school, just as he took the bus to get home in the afternoons. Gifted and Talented was a district-wide initiative, and Amy was one of the teachers who helped with the early-morning group at her own school, so she couldn’t take Lyle and still make it to her school in time. We lived in a different elementary school carveout than the one in which Amy worked. Amy and I had done this deliberately when we were finding a place to live so Lyle wouldn’t have to put up with being that kid, the one whose mom was also his teacher. As it turned out, Lyle probably wouldn’t have cared. But we hadn’t known that at the time. We hadn’t known Lyle. Amy gave me a hug. It felt spontaneous, and I hugged her back and kissed the top of her head. “Have a good day, boys.” “Okay, Mom,” Lyle said, as if he was making a promise he had every intention of keeping. Amy looked at me. “No mountain lions, okay?” “No mountain lions.” I shot an exaggerated look at the microwave clock and eyed Lyle, brows raised. “Ready to go, partner?” “Yes,” he said, eyes intense and serious. The Civic was roadworthy. We followed Amy in her minivan for a few blocks before we turned and headed for Lyle’s elementary school. I stopped in front of his school. There were a few other parents there, letting their sons and daughters out. I recognized them as part of the Gifted and Talented program. “You want me to walk you inside, bud?” Sometimes he still wanted me to. I thought it might be one of those days, after the day we’d all had before. “No, that’s okay, Dad.” He pulled his backpack to his chest and moved to get out of the car but stopped and looked back with his hand on the handle. “Dad?” “Yeah, bud?” “Are you going to leave again?” A vise clamped down over my heart, pulling the breath out of my lungs. I leaned over and met my son’s eyes. “No, bud, I’m not going to leave again. I don’t know what happened, but I’m not going anywhere.” He gazed at me. “Bye, Dad.” I watched him make his way into the building, a small figure among other small figures. Then, taking a breath, I put the car into drive and left the parking lot. I made it to work early, even before Casey, the receptionist. I walked through the maze of silent cubicles to my small work area and sat. A headache formed behind my eyes, pulsing distantly but growing more insistent. I was still bandaged up. The headache was likely thanks to my neck muscles, still stiff and sore from my tumble down the road, so I did some brief stretches in front of my monitors, watching the twins of myself move in the matte reflections. When I logged on, I had dozens of emails of varying levels of priority, including one from Melissa telling me to come see her for a one-on-one regarding my absence for the last two days and how I should have handled things. Others were code changes, checkouts, reviews. Two days of my work life gone, and now I had to catch up. I was trying to organize the emails when it happened. One moment I was sitting there, my hand on the mouse, headache pulsing with my heartbeat, then everything slipped again, a fractional impression of world-shifting movement. I fell and landed ass-first on the hard carpet of my cubicle. Off-balance, I reeled backward, my back hitting the seat of my chair. The chair rolled into the hallway and thudded into the wall of the cubicle across from mine. “Whoa, shit,” someone said a few feet away. I looked up in time to see Andy, my coworker and cubicle neighbor, poke his head up over the side of the separator. “Scott?” I sat there, blinking. “Andy?” “Scott, man, I didn’t hear you come in.” He walked around the edge of the cubicle. “Where’ve you been the past few days? Mel’s going apeshit. And your wife, she called here, like, four times looking for you.” I pulled myself up using the edge of the desk for support. “The past few days?” My computer was off, the screens dark. “Yeah, man. You didn’t show up Monday or Tuesday, then we hear you got in a car accident or something. You were supposed to come in Wednesday, and your computer was on, but you were gone. Where you been? Your wife sounded upset. I mean, like, really upset.” My phone chimed and buzzed. I pulled it out and unlocked the screen. I had dozens of new texts and voicemails. But I took in the notifications as an afterthought. My eyes were drawn to the time and date. 7:52 AM. Friday, April 17. “Jesus Christ,” I whispered. “It’s Friday?” Andy frowned at me. He reached up, tentatively, as though to pat me on the shoulder, but he let his hand fall. “Um. You okay, Scott?” “No. No, I’m not okay, Andy.” “Can I, like, do something? Help?” “No.” I stopped. “Yeah, actually. Tell Melissa I’m sorry, and I’ll call her later.” I pushed by Andy and headed out the way I’d just come in. The way I’d just come in two days ago. “You serious? You’re going to get fired, man. You gotta talk to her yourself, explain whatever happened.” “Just tell her I’ll call,” I said over my shoulder. I was already thumbing the icon on my phone to bring up my voicemail. I started to jog. My car was in the same spot. Two yellow tickets flapped under the windshield wiper, blaring in large letters that employees could not use the office lot for overnight parking and threatening me with a tow. I grabbed the tickets and got in, holding the phone to my ear with my shoulder. “Mr. Treder.” It was Melissa. “You know, this is becoming a habit. And I don’t mean that in a good way—” I deleted the message. The next message started. “Scott… I can’t believe—I can’t believe this is happening again. It’s seven at night, Scott. I called Andy. He said the Honda’s out in front of your office and your computer was on, but no one’s seen you. I don’t—Lyle’s upset. He hasn’t said anything, but I can tell…” There was a long pause. “Call me.” I grimaced and gripped the steering wheel with one hand as I started the car. “Mr. Treder—” I deleted Melissa again. The next one began with a long silence, filled with slow breathing. Then: “I don’t know, Scott. Really. I mean, am I overreacting? Maybe, I guess, maybe I am. But how should I react? How would any wife react when their husband starts disappearing for days at a time? I waited. I thought maybe— maybe you’d show up, like you did on Tuesday.” Another pause. “Call me when you get this.” I ended the call before the next message could start. I thumbed through the contacts and speed-dialed Amy’s phone, even as I put the car in reverse and started out of the parking lot. She answered on the third ring. “Scott?” “Amy, honey, I don’t know what’s going on—” “Scott.” “Yes, it’s me. I—” “Scott, did you—what’s going on?” “Amy—” “It’s been two days, Scott. Two days without a single word. Not even a text.” “I know. I mean, I don’t, I don’t know—” “How should I take all this, Scott? How would you take it if you were me?” “I—I don’t know, Amy. I really don’t. But I would give you a chance to explain or I’d help you figure it out.” She was silent. I heard her breathe. “Look, Amy. I’m on my way home. Are you home? We’ll talk about this, okay? We’ll figure out what’s going on.” My heart was pounding in my chest. “Scott, I—” “I’ll be home in a few minutes. We can talk about it then.” I gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles popped. I stopped at a red light. She had to listen. I had no idea what I would say, what I could say, other than the truth. But she had to listen. “Okay, Scott. Okay. I’ll play along. But you have to explain this to Lyle, because I’m—I’m struggling here.” “I know. Okay. Are you home?” “Yes. I—I took the day. Another day. Lyle’s here. He stayed home from school.” “I’m on my way.” Someone honked behind me, making me jump. The light was green. I pushed down on the accelerator. “All right.” She hung up. I put the phone in the cupholder and drove. I started shaking. I knew what was coming, what my body was doing. My palms were wet against the steering wheel, and my heart pounded as the muscles in my arms shook. Pain radiated from my neck, from all the scrapes and bruises across my body. I looked in the mirror and away again. I had to breathe. “Stop,” I whispered. “Okay. It’s okay. Stop. Calm down.” I used the breathing exercises my grandmother had taught me, that I had honed over the years. They helped. The attack subsided, for the moment. I drove straight through town as fast as I dared. At every red light I sat and tapped the wheel with my thumbs and tried not to look at myself in the mirror. My phone rang twice during the twenty-or-so-minute drive. Both times the caller ID showed my office, no doubt Melissa, calling. I let them go to voicemail. It was a liberating experience, ignoring my boss like that. The job, which seemed so important a few days earlier, just… wasn’t. I pulled into the driveway next to Amy’s minivan. When I pushed through the front door, I found Amy sitting on the couch next to Lyle in the family room. There was a cup of coffee and a cup of hot chocolate on the coffee table in front of them. The hot chocolate was in an oversized polar bear mug. Amy didn’t get up. Her arm was around Lyle. Her lips were pressed tight. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. Lyle gazed at me with an unreadable expression. “Hi, Dad.” “Hey, bud, you okay?” “You left again.” The vise clamped down on my heart again. The strength of it hunched my shoulders. I glanced at Amy. She met my eyes. I looked back at Lyle and crouched before him. “I know, bud. And I know I promised I wouldn’t leave. But I don’t know what happened.” “Was it the same as the last time?” he asked. “Yes. Just… longer.” I could almost see Lyle’s brain at work, trying to piece things together, trying to figure out if I was telling the truth and, if I was, what the truth meant. Amy wore a sweater I’d given her years ago. I wondered if she’d remembered it was a gift from me when she’d put it on that morning. The corners of her eyes were tight as she watched me. “Scott. I called the police. I filed a missing person’s report. I told them you’d been in an accident the day before. That maybe you had a bad concussion after all, that it hadn’t shown up at the doctor’s.” I rocked back on my heels and rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “Okay. Okay. I wish you hadn’t.” “What was I supposed to do?” “I—I don’t know.” “I imagined you out there. Wandering around. Maybe not even knowing who you…” She trailed off, her chin quivering, and she hugged Lyle tighter to her. “You were gone two days, Scott.” “I…” I couldn’t think of what to say. Lyle peered at me. “Dad?” “Lyle. Bud. I don’t know what’s going on.” He waited. “I’m—I’m scared, bud,” I said. “I’m scared it might happen again.” Lyle pushed himself off the couch and put his arms around me. “It’s okay, Dad.” I felt his small arms tremble. I picked him up. He buried his head against my shoulder. Tears welled in my eyes. For a long moment I only stood there. “Scott,” Amy said. “Sit down, okay?” I set Lyle down. Lyle clambered back up next to Amy. I sat across from them. No one said anything. Amy gazed at me, and I looked alternately at her and at Lyle. Lyle’s expression was again unreadable. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to just repeat myself. I wanted to do better, to explain, to give her and Lyle what they needed. But I had no idea what the hell was going on. Amy licked her lips. “So.” “So.” “Let’s start over. It happened again.” “That’s right.” “You skipped over two days.” “Yes.” “And you were at work when it happened?” “It was the same time as last time. Exactly the same. Seven fifty-two.” “It sounds crazy.” “I know.” “Do you have any idea…” She trailed off, glancing at Lyle. “Two days, Scott.” “I know.” “Do you really?” She shook her head. “I don’t think you do. I don’t think you can.” “I’m so sorry, Amy. I really am. I wish I knew what this was.” I pushed my hair back with both hands. Gripped my head with my arms. Leaned against the plush back of recliner. “I—I looked it up yester… I mean, Tuesday. There’re reports of other people losing track of time, missing time. Not exactly like this, but…” I saw a flicker in her eyes. The need for an explanation. “Like what? What happened to them?” “The crazier ones talk about UFOs.” Her eyes narrowed, and I hurried on. “But websites talk about multiple personality, schizophrenia.” “You think you might have some kind of mental disorder? Should we get you an MRI? Some other tests?” “I don’t know. Maybe? But a mental break doesn’t explain everything. Like how, both times, I was in the same spot, even traveling the same speed, when it happened, when I—when I came back.” “Came back.” I nodded. “Your bandages are all the same. You haven’t changed them. Since Wednesday. And your clothes.” “I—yes. I mean, no.” “You don’t really think it’s something wrong with your head, do you?” I hesitated. “No. No, I don’t.” “Then what’s going on, Scott?” “I don’t know.” I glanced at Lyle. He watched me, his eyes rendered small by the lenses of his glasses. “You have to give me more than that,” Amy said. “We need more than that.” The walls were coming up. I could see it, feel the shape of what was coming. It was in the way she sat, the rigid posture, the hard eyes. She was laying the foundations for what she needed to protect herself. If I didn’t get my act together, those walls could stand for days. She didn’t often get mad at me, even when I was being an idiot. More than once she’d forgiven me for things I would have been low-key angry about for days had our roles been reversed. But when she did get mad, she went all in. All that went through my head in a shot. As they stared at me, I put my hands together. My palms were clammy with sweat again. My heart pounded, booming against my chest like I was running for my life. I made myself take two long, deep breaths. Forcing myself calm for the second time that morning. The last time I’d had a severe panic attack I’d been in a hospital hallway outside my grandmother’s room after she’d died. My lifeline, my anchor and bulwark against my father’s disapproval for years— gone. I let out the last breath slow, conscious of Amy’s eyes on me. Lyle’s eyes. Taking in everything, as always. A panic attack would not help right now. I looked up, still taking even, deliberate breaths. “I know. I know, Amy. I wish I had more. I wish I had an explanation.” “Because right now, Scott, right now this sounds crazy. It sounds like you’re lying. This can’t—it has to be an act.” “Well, I’m not. Lying, I mean, or performing. The crazy part… well, I’m not so sure on that.” It was a pitiful attempt at humor, but it came out too bitter, too dark, to be funny. Silence stretched. “So,” Amy said. “This, whatever it is. Is it going to happen again?” I almost said, No, absolutely not, I’m not going anywhere. Then I looked at Lyle. “I hope not. But it already happened twice.” “What do you want us to do, Scott?” How things must look to her. I had a hard time even imagining what I would do if she up and disappeared for a day, came back, then vanished again for two days. I probably wouldn’t handle things as well as she was. I swallowed hard. “Help me.” “How?” “Stay with me. Stay with me tomorrow morning. At seven fifty-two.” Seconds ticked by. Lyle gripped his mother’s hand and gave her a brief, reassuring smile. She smiled back, her lips trembling. “All right,” she said. “All right, Scott.” I let out a breath I wasn’t aware I was holding. “Thank you.” She didn’t reply. She sat there, gazing down at Lyle. The rest of the day passed far too quickly. I spent much of it trying not to think about what had twice happened, trying not to wonder what it would mean if it happened again—or what it would mean for my marriage if it didn’t. This time, when Amy invited me to the park, I went with them. She even cracked a tentative joke about mountain lions and aggressive house cats. I ran up and down the steps of the elaborate dragon-themed play castle with my son, happy he hadn’t decided he was too old for this sort of thing. Not yet. I half carried him as he did his best on the monkey bars across the moat, his shoes dangling above the dragon’s gaping maw. I felt his heart through his thin chest, felt the warmth of his body pressed against me. We went on the swings, and I applauded that he was now able to get swinging all on his own. My heart climbed up into my throat when he jumped off at the apex of a swing. He tumbled but was back up on his feet in seconds, laughing and adjusting his glasses, and I jumped off and chased after him. I really committed to the moment, reveling in the fact I could still make this ever-somber child smile and laugh like the seven-year-old he was. The sun shone. It was warm. The spring air was cool, and it felt good to charge around after Lyle. I hadn’t played with him enough in the past few months. I’d been too wrapped up in the day-to-day demands of work and bills and life. Melissa called a few more times that morning, then stopped. Usually at this time of day I’d be deep into code, in my cubicle, drinking cup after cup of coffee and counting the minutes until lunch and then end of day. Checking out repos, branching forks, hunting bugs. Rationally, I knew I should call her back. I should beg to keep my job. But I couldn’t bring myself to disconnect from my small family, even for a few minutes. Instead, I ran around the playground with my son while Amy watched, her smile genuine but the corners of her eyes tight. That evening Lyle and I read in the spare bedroom again. And, like before, I had a hard time concentrating on my book. Lyle finished Jurassic Park and moved on to Sphere, another of Michael Crichton’s classic epics. I noticed him looking up at me more often, as if reassuring himself I was still there. I felt his eyes each time he looked up, but I kept my head down, appearing to read, because I sensed he didn’t want me to notice. He wanted to watch me. I wondered if he’d come into the den the last few nights, alone, when I wasn’t there. Perhaps he’d sat in my chair, in my spot. Feeling me not being there. Amy came at eight. She stood in the doorway. “Time for bed, Lyle.” “Okay, Mom.” She watched him leave and looked back at me. “Seven fifty-two.” “Yes.” “Okay. Okay. Come upstairs.” An hour later we lay in bed together, both staring at the darkened ceiling. I listened to her breathe. I’d matched my own breathing to hers. Or she’d matched mine. I heard rustling under the covers, and her hand, surprisingly cold, found mine. She gave a tug. I rolled toward her even as she turned on her side to face away. I put my arm over her shoulder and hugged her close, our bodies forming together beneath the flannel sheets. I buried my face in her hair and smelled the pomegranate shampoo she used. “Are you lying?” she whispered. “No. No, I’m not.” “This isn’t some attempt to drive us away?” “No.” “What’s going on, Scott?” I let out a slow breath. I stroked her arm. “I don’t know.” I tried to keep the frustration out of my voice, but it came through anyway, bitter and hot. “I, just—it’s hard. You know?” “I know.” “I was so… It wasn’t like you, Scott. It’s not you. I was so angry. So angry. I even… I even hoped, imagined, that you were hurt somewhere. Trapped somewhere. Being hurt somewhere gave you an excuse but it also—” She let out a hard breath. “It punished you.” I shut my eyes. Pressed them together, hard. I kept my palm on her arm. Felt her skin. “I had to keep it together for Lyle,” Amy whispered. “I have to be strong for Lyle, even though he’s just confused and… And the stuff I had, with my parents, my dad, you know…” “I know.” “I won’t put Lyle through that, Scott. Not what Kate and I went through. I can’t.” “You won’t have to.” Kate was her older sister. She and her husband lived in Sun Prairie. I was not her biggest fan, nor she mine. “It’s hard to take in.” “I’m not having an easy a time with it myself.” There was a quiet moment. I tried to feel her body as much as I could, feel her warmth and presence next to me. There was a sudden urgency to it, a need to pay close attention to the sensations. “What if it’s all in your head?” she asked. “I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.” “But what if it is?” “Honestly, honey, I’m more worried it isn’t.” She was silent again, long enough I thought she might have fallen asleep. Then she whispered, “Yeah.” She fell asleep sometime later. I stayed awake late into the night, holding her close, not willing to turn over and let her go. CHAPTER 3 We waited, the three of us, around the kitchen table. Lyle and Amy sat across from me. I sat with my back to the window, the blinds pulled shut. Minutes ticked by. The conversation I tried to keep alive tapered off after breakfast, and finally, as 7:52 AM approached, it died. We sat there, watching the clock on the microwave. I had my phone in my hand to double-check the time. The headache was there again, behind my eyes. I hadn’t slept much the night before. I stopped myself from rubbing my eyes. No need to worry Amy even more. Amy put her arm around Lyle, her face drawn. “What do we do if—” “I’ll come back. Even if I disappear, I’ll come back. I have before.” She looked away. I turned to Lyle. “Whatever you see, buddy, just remember I love you, and I’ll always come back to you.” I had to stop twice to get the words out. Lyle nodded without blinking. It was 7:51. I blew out a long breath. I looked at Amy, drawing her eyes back to my own. “Wait for…” The world slipped. “…me.” I jerked, but I was still sitting in the chair, behind the breakfast table, in the kitchen. Across from me, in different clothes and standing, rather than sitting, Amy and Lyle gaped at me. Then Amy burst into tears and ran from the room. Lyle turned to watch his mother go. My phone had come with me, just as it had the last two times, just as my clothing had. I held the phone up and watched the date change through the cracked face as it rejoined the network. Wednesday, April 22. It had been Saturday the 18th. I looked up. Lyle watched me. “Four days?” He walked around the table and put his arms around me, a motion that might have been awkward if not for its pure innocence. “We didn’t know if you were coming back.” I put my cheek against his head and held him. “What did you see?” “You just vanished. Poof. Well, except, not really any poof. We left the chair in the same spot. We checked every day. Seven fifty-two. We waited every day for you. Then you came back.” “Four days. It’s getting longer.” “It’s doubling.” I blinked. “You’re right. It’s doubling.” Excerpted from The Traveler, copyright © 2026 by Joseph Eckert. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Traveler</i> by Joseph Eckert appeared first on Reactor.

News The Boroughs The Boroughs Trailer Shows Us a Little More of Its “Special Town Just for Grownups” Today’s award for Overly On the Nose Song Choice goes to “Golden Years” By Molly Templeton | Published on May 5, 2026 Screenshot: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Netflix When it comes to Netflix’s The Boroughs, I am Alfred Molina’s doubtful expression: The previous trailer was unconvincing, and Netflix’s insistence that this series comes from the Stranger Things guys is a touch misleading. They are executive producers, but the show’s creators and showrunners are Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, who also created The Dark Crystal: The Age of Resistance. That is a different species than Stranger Things! But like Molina in this trailer—which begins with him skeptical and cranky about moving to the titular retirement community—I am being slowly won over. Molina, whose character Sam is described as a grieving widower, is the newest resident of the Boroughs, which is already home to “a curmudgeonly ex-engineer, a sharp-witted former journalist, a spiritual seeker, a cynical music manager, and a brilliant doctor running out of options.” Those characters are played by Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Denis O’Hare, Clarke Peters, and Bill Pullman, though to be honest I am not entirely clear who’s playing whom. I suspect O’Hare is the cynical music manager, which is excellent casting for the former vampire king of Mississippi (on True Blood). According to Netflix, this gaggle of retirees find their lives changed “when a terrifying nighttime encounter reveals that something monstrous is stalking the manicured cul-de-sacs.” The truth is out there—perhaps on the golf course, perhaps in the pool. Probably not at the bar, but one never knows. Are the creatures aliens? Friends? Foes? The result of terrible experimentation on older folks? Co-creator Addiss told Tudum that it was “fundamentally important” that the characters’ ages are not played for jokes. “It is part of why they are our heroes,” he said. The point of the show is to ask what these folks—and anyone—will do with the time they have left. “It was important to us that was the question because it’s a question that anybody can ask. It’s a question that any audience of any age can ask,” Addiss said. The Boroughs premieres on Netflix on May 21st.[end-mark] The post <i>The Boroughs</i> Trailer Shows Us a Little More of Its “Special Town Just for Grownups” appeared first on Reactor.

Books Seeds of Story Ixnay on the Post-Apocalyptic Cannibals: Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell Recognizing that disasters and tragedies tend to bring out the best in people is the first step toward real progress. By Sarah | Published on May 5, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, a book that every author should be required to read before writing about apocalypses, disasters, and crises of all types. Possibly also every journalist. Or maybe just everyone. What It’s About We all know this script: the seas have risen, the meteors have struck, and society has collapsed. A small band of survivors, probably led by one hard-headed cold-equations man following “lifeboat rules,” fights off looters and leeches and cannibals. Most of the world has descended into panic and riot. It’s a war of all against all, and life has become nasty, brutish, and short. This is not, it turns out, how disaster works in real life. Solnit brings together anthropological research and her own reporting to show that actually, most people become more prosocial following disasters. They pull together. They help each other. They share resources. And they create temporary communities that find joy and solidarity in the face of destruction. There are exceptions, and those exceptions mostly come from those who dominated the social structures disrupted by crisis. Too often, authorities fear the “threat” from ad hoc disaster response communities, and are more eager to control survivors than to help them survive. And media looking for dramatic stories are eager to perpetuate the narrative of trauma-driven savagery. These pressures, along with the exhaustion from chronic stress that can supplant initial momentum, too often break down these “paradises” of mutual aid and social connection. When they don’t, Solnit suggests, remarkable things can result. Her first example comes from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, where community members came together to feed, heal, and shelter each other in a situation where half the population had become unhoused. Many reported later on the sense of solidarity and fellowship, and the freedom found when human connection mattered so much more than possessions. Meanwhile the National Guard came in with orders to kill “looters,” which they followed with enthusiasm. Convinced that they were forestalling mob riots (of which there was no sign), they “protected the city from the people” and murdered those trying to requisition medical supplies, gather groceries with full permission from grocers, or dig survivors out from the rubble. They actively interfered with firefighting attempts, causing even more destruction than the original quake. These descriptions echo those from Hurricane Katrina, which Solnit added to the book at the last minute. I remember a particularly pointed comparison of press coverage describing people of different races “looting” versus “gathering” supplies from flooded stores. Likewise, the occupying military—and heroic everyday responses—are extremely familiar to anyone following the present-day news from Minneapolis. Solnit shows similar patterns after the Halifax Explosion of 1917, the Mexico City Earthquake of 1985, and 9/11. But there are differences as well. The worst of the disasters, the Mexican earthquake killed over 10,000 people and left 800,000 homeless. It highlighted the effects of government corruption and shoddy construction, and provoked lasting changes—sparked by those who came together during the disaster. Labor unions and housing rights collectives organized to improve conditions that had put so many at risk. The government tried to use the destruction as a pretext for relocating poor communities; communities pushed back. The solidarity formed in disaster lasted, and while Mexico continued (and continues) to have extensive problems, people held onto what they learned and used it to make real progress. Disasters bring together people on the ground—those in the best position to help each other and share resources. They also threaten elite leaders, who often fear more for their extensive property than for human lives. Disasters also draw attention to leadership failures. Credit for successes is also an option (recall the Roman response to Pompei from Four Lost Cities), but only if leaders focus more on providing real help than on panicked defense of their own power. As disasters become more common, the rest of us need to pay attention to our own communal power, and build past the initial moments of mutual aid. Buy the Book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster Rebecca Solnit Buy Book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster Rebecca Solnit Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget It’s 2001, and I’m driving into grad school on the morning of September 11th. By the time I get there the second plane has hit the World Trade Center, and this is clearly no accident. We’re on Long Island and everyone knows somebody near Ground Zero. I comfort my professors, and join the other students pulling together to figure out what we can do. Everyone is being kind and finding ways to help—as long as you don’t look Muslim. It’s 2022 and I’m finally watching the Parable of the Sower opera at the Kennedy Center. It’s based on one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors, but I’m struck by how very obviously it predates Solnit’s book. Even Octavia Butler—visionary, clear-eyed, and imagining paths through fascism and climate change—wrote a crisis that looks like a white-flight fantasy about the horrors of walking through Central Park. Why should cooperation take a messiah? It’s 2026, and I’m thinking about the self-contradictory nature of crisis response. The initial solidarity and selflessness after 9/11 ultimately faded into bigotry and surveillance and war. The initial solidarity and selflessness of the COVID-19 pandemic ultimately faded into bigotry and fascism and war. But Solnit’s right about long-term effects. We’ve held onto some of the mutual aid institutions founded in 2020, and are moving away from the valorization of overwork despite employers’ best efforts. Authorities will always try to leverage fear and stress—how can we preserve and expand our first, most social responses to those things? How can we resist being redirected toward exclusion? The exhaustion of chronic crisis too often undermines our better natures. And yet, and yet. Even with those worries and limitations, Solnit tells us something that we often see in person, and rarely see elsewhere. Stories and media tell us, too often, that crisis brings out our worst natures. That you’d better bar your door against looters and violent gangs. And these fears make us easier to control. If you don’t go outside, you never see what people are building. If you do go outside, you need to know that what you’re seeing isn’t a wild exception to the barbaric rule. I have a long list of stories that do it wrong. Disaster movies and thrillers would prefer the drama of fighting off cannibal gangs (Where do they all come from???) than the drama of figuring out how to feed your block on a portable grill—or of fighting off police to get at needed medical supplies. People in shelters holding off invaders, fighting each other, held together only by alpha “captains.” Charismatic madmen getting from Point A to human sacrifice in a matter of days. It’s just not how most people actually work, and it’s time we realized that and move on to the business of figuring out how to do better after the first few weeks have passed. Why is it so easy to believe that our neighbors (or the people on the other side of town) are held back from mob violence only by a fragile veneer of normality? The story shows up again and again, most often told by those who benefit from telling it. Anxious authorities want to be the only organizing force, and to protect property more than people. Media news falls into the trap of seeking excitement and engagement over truth, and has done so since long before social media algorithms exacerbated that tendency. And even in the age of climate change, we encounter more disasters on screen and page than in real life—if we’re not careful, we believe their tropes over our own lying eyes. A Paradise Built in Hell is a much-needed counternarrative, and once you’ve read it you’ll never see disasters, or humanity, quite the same way again. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories The Real Villains. Admitting that a good disaster tale needs human conflict, it’s time to replace post-apocalyptic biker cannibals with post-apocalyptic police militias. (They can still be cannibals, I guess, if you really want.) In San Francisco in 1906, the National Guard exacerbated fires with explosives and killed people working in the rubble. Almost a century later, police shot Black men in flooded New Orleans, ostensibly to prevent “looting.” After the 1985 earthquake, the Mexican government tried to bulldoze collapsed buildings from which people were still pulling children; students lay down in front of the construction equipment to block them with visible bodies. Time and again, power fears solidarity, and protects itself lest “order” collapse. We need more cinematic versions of these very real threats—stories that show everyday people simultaneously dealing with disaster recovery and occupation from above. Learning from Paradise. Stories about hopeful futures sometimes stumble over “how we got there.” Solnit shows how valuable it can be to leverage the solidarity of immediate disaster—and how much work is required to keep that momentum going. It’s doable, but it’s not easy. How does a sheet metal soup kitchen turn into feeding each other long-term? Once we’ve combined resources to pull people from flood waters, what more can we do? How do we can hold onto our crisis-born sense of connection? I’d love to see more solarpunk and hopepunk and cli-fi about building movements from the rubble. New Growth: What Else to Read Rutger Bregman’s Human Kind: A Hopeful History also talks about situations that have brought out the best in people, and argues with cynical narratives about human nature. If you want to look at the how-to of building long-term from disaster solidarity, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care talks about the mutual aid work that’s growing from COVID responses. We Will Rise Again, an anthology edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older, is full of stories about speculative protest and solidarity movements. I’ve mentioned it here before, but Izzy Wasserstein’s “The Rise and Fall of Storm Bluff, Kansas” feels particularly relevant, not so much because of disaster as because of a clear-eyed sense of elite panic. I really like the communal responses to a catastrophic meteor impact that start off Mary Robinette Kowall’s The Calculating Stars. In a very different sort of story, I also love the communal versus authoritarian communities in Mad Max: Fury Road, which has all the scary-awesome biker gangs anyone’s heart could desire. Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds and follow-up Those Beyond the Wall riff on Mad Max tropes, and imagine very different communities that can grow in the wake of disaster. One of my favorite musicals is Come From Away, based on an oral history of how Gander, Newfoundland took in stranded plane travelers in the wake of 9/11. Jim DeFede’s The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland offers the full non-fiction version of the same story. Please feel free to share your thoughts on the book, your own recommendations for further reading, or your favorite non-cannibalistic disaster responses in the comments![end-mark] The post Ixnay on the Post-Apocalyptic Cannibals: Rebecca Solnit’s <i>A Paradise Built in Hell</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books Terri Windling Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife Continues to Inspire The novel is a living conversation between art and poetry, the past and the present, nature and community… By Alex Dueben | Published on May 5, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of The Wood Wife. When first published, Terri Windling was a familiar name to many as an editor at Ace and Tor, the editor and co-editor of seemingly countless anthologies and books, the creator and editor of the Borderland shared universe. She’s had a long career as a writer of books for children, a critic and scholar, and artist. Windling has lectured at Oxford University, founded Endicott Studio, co-edited the Journal of Mythic Arts from 1987-2008, contributed to The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, collaborated with Brian and Wendy Froud on multiple projects. Her career has been so vast and varied that writing a debut novel that was awarded the Mythopoeic Award, and has since been republished as part of the Tor Essentials series, might be seen as just one among many impressive accomplishments, depending on how you first encountered her work. And yet The Wood Wife is what I think of when I think of Windling. It’s the story of Maggie Black, a poet turned journalist, who inherits the estate of the reclusive poet Davis Cooper, her friend and former mentor with whom she’s been corresponding for decades. Middle-aged, divorced, and no longer at home in Los Angeles, Black intends to put Cooper’s affairs in order and finally start the biography of Cooper that she’s wanted to write for years. But she soon finds herself falling in love the with the desert, fascinated by a younger man who lives nearby, and coming face to face with the wild spirits who are tied to the mysterious deaths of Cooper and his wife. Buy the Book The Wood Wife Terri Windling Buy Book The Wood Wife Terri Windling Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleIndieBoundTarget Many of the threads, themes, and prevailing interests that wind through Windling’s career can be glimpsed in the text, which weaves together surrealism and the supernatural, magical realism and mythic lore. Fantasy is a living tradition, and Windling’s debut novel is the work of one who has spent years immersed in the genre; it exists in conversation with the anthologies she’s edited, but also with writers from the past and contemporaries working in a similar vein, including Mary Stewart and Patricia A. McKillip, Peter S. Beagle and Jane Yolen, Ellen Kushner and Charles de Lint. I think of all art as a conversation between practitioners and critics and readers and scholars, and so while Windling is not primarily known as a novelist, she has always been in constant conversation with those people and those ideas. In the same way that launching a series of anthologies of fairy tale retellings, or putting different writers with vastly different styles and approaches side by side in a collection of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, writing The Wood Wife is a way of continuing that conversation. The book had its origins in a planned series of novellas based on the artwork of Brian Froud before, as Windling writes in the Author’s Note “the original tale shape-shifted and became the novel herein.” The magic of Froud’s work is in the book and his influence is in the text, but this is a story first and foremost about the desert. This is a novel of landscape, and Windling cites many of her inspirations in her Author’s Note, including Edward Abbey and Charles Bowden. I keep thinking of Terry Tempest Williams and Gary Snyder and so many other naturalists as ultimately being more central to the book than Froud. When I read the book in the late 1990s, I had never been to the desert, and while I’ve never visited Tucson or the Rincon Mountains, where the book is set, I’ve since spent time in other deserts, in the U.S. and the Middle East. I’ve seen the desert in bloom, watched the sun set and stars rise, seen the light change over the course of the day in ways that are startling. This constantly changing light in the desert is something that people have long written about and depicted in art, and this experience is a key part of the novel. Shape-changing is a theme of the book, and the desert-dwelling creatures who live in the mountains are changing shape. Every desert is different, though. In the mythology of the book there is a universal shape to the world beyond what most people see or understand, but the creatures are unique to the desert landscape. Their forms shift and transition, remaining fluid, and there’s a sense in the novel that humans have a tendency to try to shape forces and ideas into solid forms, personalizing and anthropomorphizing them in ways that limit them, and limit our own understanding. Yet there are rules and patterns that recur in the natural and supernatural spaces in this book and elsewhere. Ritual and imitation. Offerings and sacrifices. Blood and death. There is always a cost to knowledge and experience. An amorality that is chilling, and yet, it is part of the essence of the natural world. Like any good book, The Wood Wife is about many things, and one of them is middle age. I know that many find it a depressing term, but speaking as one on the far side of forty, I feel comfortable using it. This is a book that doesn’t see this period of life as something to grieve, but as an opportunity for reinvention and transformation. This is a book about change and Maggie is at the heart of it. Her exact age is never given, but I think of Maggie as somewhere between 35 and 45. Not old, but no longer young. Running away from the past—her ex and a Los Angeles that no longer feels like home—as much as running towards the future. Again, very middle-aged. Maggie—who was Eat, Pray, Loving her heart out before it was fashionable—takes the work of inheriting Cooper’s estate seriously, and is ready start work in earnest on the biography that she’d first approached him about years ago, though he’d demurred at the time. She wants to go through his unpublished work, and the paintings of his late wife. She also wants to understand him better. Over the years Cooper had become something of a mentor to her, but always kept Maggie at a remove. Writing the biography of him is a project that will both bring her closer to him and benefit her own career at the same time. It’s a freelancer mindset. Maggie is many things, and is known for her articles and her essays, but when asked who she is, she struggles to answer. Ultimately, though, she replies, “I still feel like a poet—that’s just how the world looks to me.” This is a book about poetry. The novel opens with an epigraph from Goethe: “Who wants to understand the poem / Must go to the land of poetry.” For Maggie, being in the desert helps her to rethink and comprehend Cooper’s poetry in a new way. He wrote about a landscape, and as she understands the place, she understands his work differently. But that is not the land of poetry. This is a book about art and artists and craftsmen and creation. A book infused with art and literature, poems within the text that shaped the characters, who rattle off lines from memory that they know in their bones. As a teenager discovering this book, that was what I wanted. To live a life infused with art and literature and meaning. Though Windling was also careful to note—not that I noticed back then—that money is always a concern. While the book exalts poetry, it never suggests that other art is inferior. (Though it clearly has opinions about magazine articles.) There are painters and paper makers, book binders and musicians, there is dancing and food—all these creative forms that express joy and what it means to be human. At one point Maggie attends a concert only to the find the band’s name is “Big Bad Bayou Rattler Boys,” asking “What kind of a name is that?” “There are musicians out of four different bands jamming together tonight. Bayou Brew is a Cajun band. Diamondback Rattlers are Tex-Mex, mostly. Big Bad Wolf plays Celtic punk and the Momba Rhomba Boys are reggae,” her neighbor Dora explains. In the same way that the band represents a jubilant fusion of musical styles and traditions, the book similarly embraces all of these different arts and the people who make them. These expressions of creativity and joy that Windling loves and sees as part of the human landscape—as important and vital to document as her descriptions of the saguaros and the sunsets. More so, because so many of the characters don’t see themselves as artists, or see what they do as important. Maggie insists otherwise, affirming the power of creativity against characters’ protests that their work has no value. I suspect these protestations echo sentiments that Windling herself has likely heard people express about their work and what they do, over the years. It is a beautifully felt and deeply understood vision of life that is both cosmopolitan and very specific to this patch of the Sonoran desert where a British expatriate poet like Cooper—a figure who brings to mind D.H. Lawrence or Malcolm Lowry or other Europeans who fled to the Americas—settled and married a Mexican painter, who drew from the surrealist tradition to depict the desert landscape and these visions. There’s a very long tradition of artists who were making art about the desert and the fantastic and surreal leading up to the present day, and though they are fictional, Windling clearly thinks of those artists and those traditions as just as much a part of the artistic conversation. I’m making the novel sound far more academic than it is. These elements are embedded in the text, just as the thoughtful critiques and reappraisals of fairy tales were at the heart of Snow White, Blood Red and other books in that anthology series. Windling knows that she could write an essay, but she wanted to tell a story. Just as the story comes first, art is not simply a metaphor in the novel. It a part of living, an extension of life and a reaction to life and the land. Windling has a point to make about art and artists…about those who prioritize art over life. Maggie does respect her ex-husband despite his many flaws because she knows that he is talented, but on reading an article about him and his band Estampie, she observes: There was no hint of the Nigel she knew…in the Times version of Nigel’s history, Estampie was the labor of one brilliant man. Never mind the group, much less the network of people who stood behind the group, who had formed the safety net beneath the highwire rope of success Nigel walked. It wasn’t Nigel’s fault really; this was the mold their culture fit heroes in. The independent man, the solitary cowboy striding into town at high noon. This is one of Windling’s triumphs, to emphasize the ecosystem that exists around and behind every writer and artist. One cannot help but think that it is because she spent so many years as an editor, a vital but largely invisible presence. Goethe’s land of poetry takes many shapes, and one of them is a network of teachers and mentors and friends and neighbors and supporters. One does not emerge from nothing. Art is not the work of solitary geniuses, but of a community. In piecing together the story of Davis and Anna, how their lives play out against the aged and ancient backdrop of the mountains and the landscape, the events can feel somewhat distant, taking place in the past. It’s something I think Windling recognized, because she also gives us the current-day story of two of Maggie’s neighbors, Dora and Juan. Maggie gets to know them and we see their push and pull of art and ambition, of relationships changing shape. The pain and anger when a possessed Juan burns not just his own paintings but Dora’s work as well. Windling wants us to feel that pain and violence. She wants it to hurt. This may be a faerie story, of sorts, but that doesn’t mean it’s something to regard at a safe remove. After all, Windling is the woman whose work on fairy tale retellings helped remind us that these stories were never sweet and simplistic children’s tales, but far darker and more complex. Reminding us that even if the worst is averted, the lessons they teach us are never bloodless or without cost. These stories are as savage as nature. I think about that in the context of The Wood Wife. That the human world—the physical, social, spiritual world that we have built up in urban and rural places—as being a small fraction of this larger, vaster world. That we are all subject to nature. That’s true whether we are talking about this novel and these characters, or the vastness of cosmic horror, or the way Gabriel García Márquez wrote about “the crystalline miracle” that is ice. (Which, in the desert, really can seem like magic.) Rereading the book now, I want Windling to write more. I know that she’s a busy woman who has written many stories and created paintings and poems—including one involving Tat, one of the minor characters in the novel—but I remain a little sad that this is her only novel for adults. I don’t think I realized how little I knew about Windling until I sat down to write this article, discovering one dead link after another, but I don’t think that really matters. Rereading the book, I was reminded of my younger self crushing on Maggie. Or rather, vividly remembering both wanting Maggie and wanting to be Maggie. Some of that was shallow…I recall the description of when they went out dancing: “Maggie took off her black suit jacket and threw it back to the table. Underneath she wore a man’s sleeveless undershirt–cooler, and rather sexy, Dora thought.” Maggie effortlessly pushing past gendered expectations in so many ways that reminded me of more than one poet I have fallen for. But it wasn’t completely shallow. One of the letters she exchanged with Cooper early in their correspondence read, “You interest me greatly, Marguerita Black.” Isn’t that what we all hoped for from our encounters with our elders? To find someone who sees something in us, and takes an interest in our work, inviting us into the conversation. In thinking about the book, I keep coming back to “Dammas”—a word that is central to the novel and its shape and meaning, though it’s never given a proper definition in the course of the text. “Beauty. Motion. That-Which-Moves,” as one character describes it. Or as another said, “what my Dineh relatives would call hohzo: walking in beauty. That is how a man should live his life. If he doesn’t, he sickens and dies.” As the characters talked about this and “the spiral path,” this cyclical vision of time, I kept picturing Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a massive rock sculpture built into the Great Salt Lake. It reflects how I think of Windling’s novel—as simultaneously part of the landscape and something human that overlays it. As a Boy Scout I was taught to take nothing but photographs and leave nothing but footprints. The Wood Wife, like so many works of art that are about and have been defined by a place leave far more, and yet do not impose themselves upon the land. It doesn’t seek “to turn it into New Jersey,” as one character in the book complains about cookie-cutter housing developments, but like the constructed borders, of cities, counties, countries, which lay upon the land like fictions, these stories exist in a way that offers the possibility to either see and understand a landscape on a deeper level, or to obscure it. This is a book that pushes against easy, facile descriptions of art and gender, mythology and culture. Not that these ideas are meaningless, but people and nature are far too complex to be summed up in binaries or neatly divided by borders. The natural world has its own rhythms and meanings, which we are subject to. In Windling’s hands, the only thing more magical and dangerous than the supernatural is the physical landscape and the forces of nature—just as the only thing more magical and uncertain and powerful than art is the heart.[end-mark] The post Terri Windling’s <i>The Wood Wife</i> Continues to Inspire appeared first on Reactor.