News The Last House A Night at Home Turns Into Years in The Last House Trailer Greta Lee and Wagner Moura star in a claustrophobic new horror from Netflix. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 15, 2026 Credit: Chris Baker/Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Chris Baker/Netflix On first blush, The Last House, a horror film where an unknown force seals a family inside their house, looks like a movie inspired by COVID. That sentiment continues in the trailer released today, as they realize EVERYONE is trapped inside their houses. And when the father, played by Wagner Moura, says that this will also end and we cut to over 1,000 days later, it still kinda feels like a pandemic-inspired tale. But then the doors open, and a malicious-seeming force appears to prey on humans, and I don’t know what this movie might be about anymore. “The storyline will evolve in ways that the audience certainly will not expect, but that is what makes this film so interesting,” Moura told Tudum. “There are layers and twists that I can’t wait for everyone to see.” The movie, which also stars Greta Lee as the mother/wife to Moura’s father/husband, comes from writer Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters) and director Louis Leterrier (Lupin, Fast X, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance). “The Last House challenges the idea of a safe haven, turning a family home into a hostile environment where survival demands unity,” Leterrier told Tudum. “This is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare, pushing them to their limits to protect each other and exposing the fragility of security—and the desperate fight to reclaim it.” In addition to Moura and Lee, the film stars Riley Chung (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes), Emma Ho (The Baker), Noah Alexander Sosnowski (Section 8), and Gabriel Barbosa (May December). It premieres on Netflix on August 7, 2026. While we wait (in our houses), check out the trailer below. [end-mark] The post A Night at Home Turns Into Years in <i>The Last House</i> Trailer appeared first on Reactor.

Books Short Fiction Spotlight Must Read Short Speculative Fiction — May 2026 Treat yourself to ten short reads to kick off the summer! By Alex Brown | Published on June 15, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Sometimes you want something long and sprawling, and sometimes your attention span can’t handle anything beyond short, sweet, and to the point. My ten favorite science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories I read in May are mostly on the shorter side. Think of them as little reading treats to help you kick off the summer.  “1,001 Best Hikes on Mars: The Peterson Historic Trail (“Peterson’s Folly”)” by Ron Fein (Small Wonders — May 2026; issue 35) This is structured like an excerpt from a travel guide, and takes readers down a trail in a canyon in the Phoenicis Lacus quadrangle in the Noctis Labyrinthus. The guide gives an overview of the terrain, the historical features at the Visitor Center, and the trail itself, with what happened to the expedition team sprinkled in.I’ll let you discover why it’s called “Peterson’s Folly.” I thought this was a neat way to tell a Mars colonization story without falling back on the usual tropes. “The Aerialist” by Yoon Ha Lee (Lightspeed Magazine — May 2026; issue 192) Kallista years for the days when she was an aerialist in a plane fueled by intoxicating faerie fuel. She had been dismissed from service in disgrace and is now crouching in a closet with a stolen typewriter. That typewriter had been on display in a museum, but it is more than the simple historical artifact it appears. It isn’t the same as her sturdy biplane, but it can still give her what she wants: to fly. Yoon Ha Lee has a fun, gaslamp-by-way-of-fairy-magic story that has hidden depths.  “Dark, Where the Sun Never Sets” by Yasmeen Amro (Phano — April 2026; issue 16) Khadija is visiting her relatives who live on a planet, Trappist-1d, where she didn’t grow up. Her relatives mostly speak Arabic where she speaks mostly English. They tell her the story of when an American space station fell out of orbit and created a crater. If you want a sci-fi story that is a metaphor for/comment on Israeli and American military aggression toward Palestine, this is an excellent place to start. As a side note, I looked up “Nabati,” what Yasmeen Amro gives as the local name for the planet, and was excited to learn it is a vernacular form of Arabic poetry largely practiced by Bedouin communities. “Excrescence” by R. F. Daniels (Quotidian Bagatelle — May 2026; issue 5) “It began as an itch in the back of my throat.” This story is too short to give a synopsis, but it’s great. I appreciated how R. F. Daniels was able to pack so much story into two paragraphs. Flash fiction sometimes feels ephemeral or like it’s just this fun, bite-sized thing that doesn’t carry much weight. Then you read one where you see how great this format can be. Daniels’ story could be stretched out by another couple thousand words, but it would lose what makes it punchy. It’s exactly what a flash fiction story should be.  “Extracted from an unravelled braid” by Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga (Uncanny Magazine — May/June 2026; issue 70) Memoire, a Rwandan immigrant now living in what I assume is Canada, opts into a new procedure that braids memory fibers into real hair and connects to her brain through her scalp. At first it seems like a way to honor her ancestors and their stories, everything she misses from her homeland. But the technology is owned by Westerners with colonial extraction as their sole interest. I loved this story, not just how well-written it is but the subtle way it gets to the point. Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga is a clever storyteller. “Me, Myself, and I” by Marsden Lyonwahl (Perseid Prophecies — Spring 2026; issue 9) John Broussard is returning home after a long absence. Home is an old plantation house in Attakapas Parish, Louisiana. Years ago, the Broussards were the most influential and wealthiest name in town, but now that has faded. The town has forgotten them and the plantation house is in ruins. John is the key to restoring their influence…whether he wants to be or not. A great Southern gothic tale with an unexpected ending. “Not Hunger, Not Feeling” by Grace Crouthamel (Allegory — Spring/Summer 2026; issue 76) How about some plague zombies? Like Gretchen, the protagonist in this story, I went into work during the plague. It was a surreal experience to see the world shut down country by country, state by state, and have to go to work anyway. The day California went on lockdown, I got up, took a shower, ate my breakfast, and went to work only to be sent home halfway through. I’m luckier than Gretchen, because in her world a strain of HSV turns people into brainless killer zombies. She and a woman from HR are trapped in a security office in their corporate office building. The living dead aren’t the only threat to their safety.  “Senescence” by aegor ray (Strange Horizons — May 4, 2026) “Without a name or need for one, he arrives scattered at the base of a tree and he rests like that, in pieces, for sixty-odd years.” This story is about a being constantly transforming states—from he to she, from  “forty-nine sticky droplets of impulse and intelligence, tucked under dried oak leaves, clinging to a stone” to a pregnant being who “flies through galaxies and deep, sick quiet.” It’s a beautifully written story with an ending that made me let out a sigh of hope. This is aegor ray’s first fiction publication, and fingers crossed it’s not his last. “The Trident-Tailed Water Monster” by Rae Zalopany (The Future Fire — May 2026; issue 2026.76) Natalie is visiting a resort near Little Lake Kerr in Central Florida. A dream about a god brought her there. She is cautious of men, and one man in particular. Men might argue she’s overly and unnecessarily cautious, but those of us who are often the targets of the patriarchy would probably say her level of caution is just fine. When she and a man who has been hassling her end up at the springs, the safety she craves is offered to her in a dangerous package. A thoughtful piece about getting what you want no matter the cost. “The Vigil of the Tenth Air” by Surya Ramkumar (Apex Magazine — May 2026; issue 153) What a breathtaking, bittersweet tale. A dead father is cremated according to Hindu tradition, however, his son fails to complete the ritual of kapāla-kriyā. Because of that, the prāṇa attaches to his son. They travel to the son’s home in an unnamed Western country. As the life force watches the son make his way through a society that demands assimilation, the difficulties of living in the diaspora become clear.[end-mark] The post Must Read Short Speculative Fiction — May 2026 appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Vampire Lestat Are You Enjoying This Exclusive Fan Experience? The Vampire Lestat, “Toledo” “Are all your songs about this guy Lewis?” By Molly Templeton | Published on June 15, 2026 Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC My regular process for reviewing TV episodes is to watch once, without taking any notes, just experiencing the episode like any viewer, and then watch again with my laptop at hand, writing down everything that seems intriguing/interesting/especially funny/etc. But with The Vampire Lestat, I had to make one change: On second watch, I have to turn on captions. I hate turning on captions. My reader-brain takes over and tries to just read instead of focusing on the whole picture. But there’s just so much. There is so much going on in any given moment of this show.  Except when there’s not. What a perfect shift, after last week’s chaos and highs, to open with the dreary part of the life of a touring band: gray, endless, repeating highways. Even when your tour bus has a frankly outlandish mid-room shower, there are some things you can’t escape. The cloud gift does not allow for carrying a drum kit and an entourage. The gray of the road gives way to Lestat’s miserable childhood, which, to be honest, I always pictured as rather more dark and gloomy. More Winterfell, less sunlight. But the problem here is less the setting than the people. In a series of escalating moments that are eventually revealed to be his really terrible dreams, Lestat illustrates what he—and his mother, Gabriella—were up against: his brothers and father, whom they call the cabbages. They are beyond dreadful. They mock Lestat’s stutter, take Gabriella’s book away, generally act as boorishly as possible. Of course, this is Lestat’s version of things. His memory is both tedious and traumatic: Every scene starts with him sitting at the same table, enduring the same garbage and abuse. People age, but everything otherwise stays the same until the introduction of the wolves. The killing of these wolves, Lestat said last episode, is something he let define him for a time. Then why does he speed right past the telling of it?  Setting aside the practical realities (by which I mean AMC’s budget), there are possibilities here. There are believers and unbelievers where Lestat’s wolf-killing background is concerned. It does seem certain that the wolves end up dead, because the villagers wouldn’t be coming to worship him otherwise. But his story elides a lot. Future Lestat, the one telling this story, is more interested in illustrating his fraught relationship with his mother. He doesn’t bother with subtext; he tells us, straight up, that she sent him out there to die, because then at least he wouldn’t be stuck in that house any more. (That he wanted the wolves to come until he didn’t is a classic Lestat detail; he wants to live, whatever form that may take.) But—and this is neither the first nor last time I will have this question about Mr. de Lioncourt—do we believe him? Or, a more polite phrasing to the question: Why is he telling the story like this? Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC This Lestat is an editor. The format of his voiceover tale—the 111 vinyl albums—is something that can’t be edited. No one can take a red pen and highlighter to it like he did to Louis’ book. A listener might skip tracks, skip sides, jump around, but they can’t take pieces out and put other pieces in. He wanted this story told in exactly his way. The documentary is, as he said, the liner notes. It’s someone else having their say alongside him. Which is kind of like Armand relating his version of events alongside Louis in season two. The setup of Louis’ storytelling is theoretically cooperative: he is telling his story to an active, present listener. When he shares Claudia’s diaries with Daniel Molloy, and then when Armand joins in, there are other voices. It becomes more elaborate, more fraught; the voices don’t always agree. But sometimes they are corroborating. Lestat, though, has both created a version of his story in which his is the only voice, and allowed, or invited, a second version. And all the while he remains furious at Louis for telling his version. For letting it go out into the world without warning Lestat. For taking away Lestat’s control over his own narrative. For making him the villain.  What does he do in return? Puts words in Louis’ mouth, for one thing. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I am trying to reserve judgment on this version of Gabriella, in part because she too is Lestat’s creation. But he is also hers: the product of her manipulation, her slipperiness, her… well, I can think of no better term than “her damage.” They made each other, and they are bound together, and is it just me or is Lestat trying just a little too hard to convince his listener just how great and fun and magical she is? Their scenes together have a languor that is very different from the chaos that surrounds Lestat with everyone else. But it’s also just the two of them. He takes her out of the equation of the rest of his life. He demands her time and then she toys with him (and with her food).  Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC Gabriella’s slinkiness, her peculiar way of holding her face, her thick accent (after all these decades!)—they feel contrived. A little campy. It all makes her hard to be around, which is pretty brilliant: Ehle’s performance, her very way of walking, contradicts everything Lestat tells us about her. He loves her, but he is not unaware of how she is. He just can’t tell that part to us straight. That scene where she finger-fucks his wounds and then walks away after he says she would still belong to him? Grotesque. Cruel. Definitive. He asks someone to confirm their love and they walk away. No wonder he’s like this.  And yet Louis (probably) doesn’t know she exists.  When Lestat is not with Gabriella, this episode, he is having arguments. Each of his bandmates takes a slightly different angle of fury and/or rage and/or curiosity on his vampiric reveal, and it’s wonderful. Alex only wants to know if he eats people. Larry gets angriest when Lestat calls it his band. Salamander, engrossed in Daniel’s book, asks really specific questions and gets specific, and possibly disappointing, answers. (“I make it a rule never to sleep with my bandmates.”) TC is snarky and also interested in details. The way Reid plays this scene, it’s like Lestat is kind of having fun—there’s relief in not having to hide anymore—but also like he wishes these foolish humans could just accept reality and get on with it. Lestat also masterfully dodges answering the great majority of their questions. Telling them he has the blood of Akasha doesn’t count. Nobody knows what that means, bud. Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC But the band argument has got nothing on the exes-across-the-conference-room-table scene with Lestat and Louis and their lawyers/fuckbuddies. I generally try not to put too much weight on what anyone says in the little post-show breakdowns, but I did love Jacob Anderson saying that he thinks Louis is trolling. He’s doing it so perfectly! Lestat, I care about you; Lestat, your songs sound like a cry for help; oh, and Lestat, I own 45 percent of your merchandise. (How? HOW does he own the merch rights? This detail is bothering me.) If anyone wondered how exactly Louis got so wealthy, now we know: real estate, merch deals, hotels, malls (??), all the other things Daniel mentions later. That was his vampire-themed hotel that got trashed. The he said/he said here is great, especially the little mutter about how supposedly Lestat was the one that called the meeting: more trolling courtesy of Louis’ team, or something Lestat didn’t tell us?  If I had time, I would watch this episode a third time just to track Sam Reid’s physicality, and the way Lestat is dressed in each of his encounters. In the meeting with Louis, Lestat is in layers and sunglasses, fully protected. Deflecting. On his dinner date with Gabriella, he’s clothed, though more lightly. Arguing with the band, he’s just out of the coffin, half naked, and notably relaxed. On stage, of course, he’s also half naked. Because he’s in control: he’s performing his stories, the versions of them he’s chosen to share. With the band, there’s that NDA. He controls the narrative. Gabriella messes with him, skewing how he sees himself, so there’s a layer of protection. And Louis took Lestat’s story entirely out of his hands. Lestat only looks Louis in the eye on Lestat’s terms: mid-performance, time stopped, a seemingly romantic gesture drastically shifted by the arrival of that book. Just like that moment on Facetime in Montreal. That concert scene is relatively brief (at least compared to last week) and decidedly not about the music. It is instead about the audience, about who’s in the crowd and how they’re interacting: Daniel directing his cameraman to film Louis and Gabriella; Daniel displeased by the arrival of Rashid; Daniel and Louis having a little private chat; Gabriella watching Lestat and, later, Louis. It is, in short, about who’s watching, and the version of things that they’re seeing. A directed version through a camera lens? A curious version, one of Lestat’s lovers eyeing the other?  And the band plays on, none the wiser. (Alex is still mad, I guess.) Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC There are two prongs to this episode’s climax (a word that feels uncomfortable to use with Gabriella around). Lestat has a private meal with mommy dearest, who says some very manipulative things about Louis and Claudia and manages to make Lestat genuinely cranky with her for the first time that we’ve seen. (Vulture clocked that he’s singing one of his mentioned-last-episode Baudelaire songs. Cheeky!) The flashbacks to her turning, and their subsequent murder of the cabbages, are jumpy and brief, almost like Lestat doesn’t want to linger on them. Their reactions after Gabriella’s turning illustrate their personalities in a nutshell: he wants to look out for her, to get her home where it’s safe. And she wants to go wipe out the rest of their family. Immediately. And she gets what she wants. (Sure, this was Lestat’s fantasy, but he doesn’t look super thrilled about it after.) I just don’t believe that this woman is the greatest person to kill time with, you know? But I was also much more interested in Daniel and Louis Go to Dinner: Lestat’s Version. I love the explicitness of the invention: “I know what you’re thinking,” Lestat says. “He wasn’t there. But this is my hour, and when tertiary figures appear in it, I will be speaking for them. Daniel, Mr. Du Lac, anyone I feel is important towards understanding how I woke the queen and unleashed her wrath upon the world. I am everywhere.” Welp! That’s a little less vague than previous references to the calamities that occur as a result of Lestat’s album and tour. He does love to invoke Akasha’s name. The hints keep coming: Gabriella references the Great Conversion, and Lestat doesn’t bat a glittery eyelash. To Louis, Raglan James says there’s been exponential growth in “your numbers.” These things are all casually stated and yet shocking in their way: The show’s perspective has been so Lestatian, so myopically focused on his loved ones, his music, his tour, his hurt, and here in episode two—there are only seven!—come all these not-quite-revelations about the precarious and threatening world outside the tour bus. I love, love, love that dinner scene, though. The way I kept forgetting that Lestat is puppeting his little narrative devices/fledglings/tertiary beings. The story Daniel told about how everyone raptures around him and he feels Armand’s presence. Louis’ dislike for Daniel’s version of him. The story Louis tells about seeing a girl who looked like Claudia—a story about love and guilt and grief and being haunted. Daniel’s apology! Louis saying he and Lestat were finding their way back when the book came out! Is any of this even real?!?! Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC And then there is the thoroughly enjoyable way that Raglan James is even more over-the-top in Lestat’s view. (Justin Kirk is having entirely too much fun with this.) Raglan gives us the only hint we’ve gotten about what happened after the end of season two, when Louis sat in his fancy apartment and invited all the other vampires in the world to come and fight him: he dispatched a rather large number of them.  So it is Louis, the sensitive vampire, the one who doesn’t eat people, that is invited by the Talamasca to take out an entire troublemaking, fentanyl-distributing coven. It is Louis who they think will be good at this. And, more pressingly for our gents, it is Louis for whom it is personal, because the Fang Gang’s leader, the one whose nickname was tattooed on the back of Baby Jenks’ neck, is none other than that absolute slimeball Bruce.  LITTLE SIPS We-scuze me! The way Gabriella kept kicking the robot without saying anything!!! This was perhaps her most likable moment. Everyone in Lestat’s family pronounces his name differently than he does. The loss of Lestat’s dog(s) and horse, in the book, are very important, which is why it’s so weird when he just sends his single dog to its doom among the wolves. Very weird indeed. There are human blood farms?!?!? Salamander just casually mentioning that Armand is a daywalker seems a detail worth noting. Lestat knows off the top of his head that he lived for 54,554 days before he met Louis, and while I do not think these two are good for each other, that does have a certain swooniness to it. “I want to play cornhole.” In theory, Lestat and Gabriella go alone to the strip club, but then Rashid is there, and then Lestat’s shittiest brother ghosts through the scene, unwanted, and phew, this man is haunted and hunted and I think we’re only seeing the half of it. When Gabriella asks if Lestat has a lot of sex, he doesn’t say yes directly. He says he’s a rock star now. The sex comes with the territory. He also asks Christine—who he says he’s fucking, but this is likely him actually messing with Louis—if he has to fuck the “fan” who owns the hotel that was trashed, and she says yes, which really implies a lot of transactional sex that flies directly in the face of his drug-fueled elevator rant about sex, though he did say not that sex was the fourth best thing a vampire could do but the fourth best thing a vampire could do to avoid thinking about the past, which, phew, there are layers to the fucked-uppedness.  Usually the phrase “gave him a daughter” would be used about a woman—gross men in books are forever demanding their wives give them sons—and so there is something extra super weirdly loaded there, given everything we know about Gabriella and her feelings about her own children (and the having of them). I started watching the Talamasca show, which is not very good, alas, but there’s a scene in the first episode where Daniel tells annoying main character Guy that the Talamasca put a whole-ass page in his book, which adds another wrinkle to the question of narrative control.  “I put the emPHAsis on the first sylLABle.”[end-mark] The post Are You Enjoying This Exclusive Fan Experience? <i>The Vampire Lestat</i>, “Toledo” appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews This Is Not Idyllic: Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey Is this a murder cult? By Tobias Carroll | Published on June 15, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Is this a murder cult? It’s a question that can come up a lot when encountering a story in which a character seeks psychological relief in the arms, literal or metaphorical, of a reclusive group that promises a better life. The film Midsommar is one good example of this; watching it, you spend much of the film waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the smiling Scandinavians to reveal a lust for blood. Yellowjackets season two featured a New Age organization that gave off cult vibes, albeit not murdery ones. Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy involves a cult that makes frequent use of meteoric hammers.  Alternately, stories involving a character seeking solace with a group promising relief tend to fall into one of two categories: inspirational works and cult dramas. Some of that is a matter of perspective, of course: Plenty of people find happiness through embracing the tenets of a specific belief system. But if you find yourself reading a novel by an author with a penchant for the uncanny where a group claims to have all the answers, it’s a safe bet that something is about to go very wrong. The question that comes to mind when reading Sarah Gailey’s Make Me Better, then, is: What? It begins with an arrival. A woman named Celia arrives by boat at an island called Kindred Cove to witness their annual Salt Festival. The event is said to have therapeutic properties; attendance is strictly limited, and the islanders can’t stop gushing about how the experience of being on the island transforms the lives of the people who go through it. Celia has her reasons for wanting to travel there. As Gailey reveals through a series of flashbacks, Celia is restless. She’s been trying to conceive a child, and has experienced several miscarriages thus far. She works as a lifestyle influencer; there’s a passing reference to her home containing products from network marketing companies. She’s also profoundly lonely, and learned of Kindred Cove through a friend named Adelaide, who told Celia about her own roots on the island and traveled there six months earlier. Celia wants what many people seek: a community, a sense of belonging, a family.  Buy the Book Make Me Better Sarah Gailey Buy Book Make Me Better Sarah Gailey Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget For much of the Salt Festival, Celia is under the supervision of Kindred Cove resident Easy. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that Easy knows more than she’s telling Celia, but that could be true of any situation in which one person has more information than another—like, say, when one of them is a longtime resident of a given community. Some of Easy’s rhetoric does tap into a vein of what could be called the menacing therapeutic, however: “You fell, and then you got back up, and now look at you. Walking on your own two feet. I’ll bet that five minutes ago, when you were flat on your back you thought you’d never be moving forward again. Do you know what I see when I look at you now?” Easy’s answer to the question she poses to Celia: “You’ll figure it out. I know you will.” If that sounds a little sketchy, phrasing summoned up by someone who’s trying to keep someone else’s spirits up but doesn’t quite know how to do so, that’s probably because it is. Earlier in the book, Easy tells Celia, “You never have to be all alone again, Celia. I’ve got you. I’ll show you everything.” Again, this probably should be setting off alarm bells—but what kind?  Celia’s journey to the island is not the only plot thread Gailey incorporates into this narrative. A parallel plotline set several months earlier focuses on Adelaide’s return to Kindred Cove, and shows the reader some of the same characters we’ve met earlier in a new light. Adelaide is no newcomer to this society, after all, though her time away from the island has led to some estrangement from her peers there. Her reasons for wanting to stay away have a familiar ring; she’d felt stifled by certain elements of the society, whose methods of living in harmony with the environment can lead to some feelings of alienation. Gradually, Gailey introduces some details that seem designed to disquiet. A selection of discarded objects could hint at violent acts in the recent past, but it’s also possible that the presence of blood was due to Kindred Cove’s practice of eschewing shoes on the island. Several characters refer to feeding the reef; that also sounds ominous, but feeding coral is something that people can do. Maybe this is all a wacky misunderstanding. Maybe it’s Celia who’s the threat. Then again, Kindred Cove is home to a building called the Old House, and the presence of capital letters there also foreshadows something ominous. Reading Make Me Better gives a sense of Gailey experimenting with how they handle pacing for this book. It’s not difficult to imagine a novella-length work telling just Celia’s story (or just Adelaide’s, for that matter). Some of the other flashbacks provide insights into Kindred Cove’s origins and to the peculiar environmental circumstances that surround it. The aforementioned reef is not the only curiosity there, and eventually Gailey reveals both how the outside world views Kindred Cove beyond its status as a healing destination and its role as the source for artisanal salt. Gailey does something else noteworthy here, and it wasn’t something I had expected. Besides the feeling that something is wrong on this island, they also casually suggest that Make Me Better might be set in the near future, rather than the present or recent past. It’s a subtle thing, but the effect is unmooring; much as Celia finds herself in a place where she doesn’t quite understand how things work, so too does the reader discover that one of their preconceptions might not apply at all.  It’s elements like this that make Make Me Better come together in a way that elevates it from some of its peers in the “is something amiss in this isolated community” narrative world. In telling the story of Celia’s desperate search for healing, no matter what the cost might be, Gailey takes several risks. The result is a slow-building sense of dread, a cautionary tale as chamber epic.[end-mark] Make Me Better is published by Tor Books.Read an excerpt. The post This Is Not Idyllic: <i>Make Me Better</i> by Sarah Gailey appeared first on Reactor.

News Only Murders in the Building Two Doctors Who—and the Incomparable Kathryn Hunter—Are Checking In to Only Murders in the Building’s London Season At this rate they’re going to cast more UK superstars than that OTHER series By Molly Templeton | Published on June 15, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share For season six, the murders are going overseas—and casting appropriately. Deadline brings the news that among the cast for the next season of Only Murders in the Building are David Tennant, Jodie Whittaker, Jim Broadbent, Richard Ayoade, Nicola Coughlan, and Kathryn Hunter. Or, in other words, the Tenth Doctor, the Thirteenth Doctor, Bridget Jones’s dad, Maurice Moss, a Derry Girl, and Syril Karn’s terrifying mother. These actors have all played so many incredible roles that I could have summed them up using entirely different properties! But these seemed fun. Also joining the cast is Adrian Lukis, who has crossed over with several of the aforementioned performers in spirit if not in spacetime: he’s in the Who spinoff The War Between the Land and the Sea (which maybe we’ll be able to see someday) and has had numerous appearances on British TV. This powerhouse lineup of actors join stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez, and a recurring cast that includes Jennifer Saunders, Sean Teale, Simone Ashley, Amar Chadha-Patel, Rhea Norwood, Matthew Beard, Sharon Horgan, and recently announced new recurring castmembers Martin Freeman, Geri Halliwell-Horner, Jamie Demetriou, Anjana Vasan, Jane Horrocks, Derek Jacobi, and Lesley Nicol. This is a LOT of murderers and/or suspects. The sixth season of Only Murders in the Building is presently in production, and continues the story begun in the season five finale, as the three sleuths/podcasters work to solve the murder of Cinda Canning (Tina Fey). The show is co-created and written by Martin and John Hoffman; you can catch up on all the murdery fun (?) on Hulu.[end-mark] The post Two Doctors Who—and the Incomparable Kathryn Hunter—Are Checking In to <i>Only Murders in the Building</i>’s London Season appeared first on Reactor.