News From Knowledge Comes With a Cost in From’s Season 4 Teaser Trailer We also now know when the new episodes will premiere on MGM+ By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on February 4, 2026 Screenshot: MGM+ Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: MGM+ Where does the time go? The fourth season of MGM+’s From is set to premiere in mere months, and today we got a teaser trailer and an official release date for the upcoming episodes. The show stars Lost’s Harold Perrineau and takes place in a town where those who enter it can’t seem to leave, no matter how hard they try. The teaser today suggests that the town’s inhabitants might finally get answers: Who is the Man in Yellow, and what does he want? Will Jade and Tabitha’s revelation be the key to finally going home? How much longer can Boyd hold the town together, even as his body and mind are falling apart? And what role will the town’s most recent arrival play in the events to come? The teaser also makes clear, however, that those answers will cost something… something bad, no doubt.   In addition to Perrineau, the show stars Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace, The Affair), Eion Bailey (Band of Brothers), Hannah Cheramy (Under Wraps, Van Helsing), Simon Webster (Strays), Ricky He (The Good Doctor), Chloe Van Landschoot (Charity, Skin), Corteon Moore (Utopia Falls), Pegah Ghafoori (The Perfect Wedding), David Alpay (Castle Rock), Elizabeth Saunders (Clarice), Avery Konrad (Honor Society), Scott McCord (East of Middle West), Nathan D. Simmons (Diggstown, This Hour Has 22 Minutes), Kaelen Ohm (Hit & Run, Eumenides Falls), Angela Moore (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Maid), A.J. Simmons (Reacher), Julia Doyle (Astrid And Lilly Save The World), Robert Joy (CSI: NY), and Samantha Brown (Y: The Last Man). It’s showrun by Jeff Pinkner (Lost, Alias, Fringe) and has episodes directed by Jack Bender (Lost, Game of Thrones, The Institute). The fourth season of From will premiere on MGM+ on Sunday, April 19, 2026, at 9 p.m. ET/PT. Check out today’s teaser-trailer below. [end-mark] The post Knowledge Comes With a Cost in <i>From</i>’s Season 4 Teaser Trailer appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Science Fiction Read an Excerpt From After The Fall by Edward Ashton Humans must be silent. Humans must be obedient. Humans must be good. By Edward Ashton | Published on February 4, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from After The Fall, the new novel by Edward Ashton that’s part alien invasion story, part buddy comedy, and part workplace satire—publishing with St. Martin’s Press on February 24. All his life, John has tried to live by those rules. Most days, it’s not too difficult. A hundred and twenty years after The Fall, and a hundred years after the grays swept in to pick the last dregs of humanity out of the wreckage of a ruined world, John has found himself bonded to Martok Barden nee Black Hand, one of the “good” grays. Sure, Martok is broke, homeless, and borderline manic, but he’s always treated John like an actual person, and sometimes like a friend. It’s a better deal than most humans get.But when Martok puts John’s bond up as collateral against an abandoned house in the woods that he hopes to turn into a wilderness retreat for wealthy grays, John learns that there are limits to Martok’s friendship. Soon he finds himself caught between an underworld boss who thinks Martok is something that he very much is not, a girl who was raised by feral humans and has nothing but contempt for pets like John, and Martok himself, whose delusions of grandeur seem to be finally catching up with him.Also, not for nothing, something in the woods has been killing people.John has sixty days before Martok’s loan comes due to unravel the mystery of how humans wound up holding the wrong end of the domestication stick and find a way to turn Martok’s half-baked plans into profit enough to buy back his life, all while avoiding getting butchered by feral humans or having his head crushed by an angry gray. Easy peasy, right? Chapter One “John!” Martok bellows as he bursts through the door. “I have news, my friend—wondrous, wondrous news! You’ll not believe what fell to me in the markets today!” John turns away from the window, the only one in the bare boardinghouse room he and Martok have shared for the past two months, where he’d been passing the afternoon watching the machinations of a murder of crows as they attempted to scavenge the carcass of a dead rat from beneath the wheels of the passing trundlecars in the street below, to see his patron hanging his formal sash on the hook by the door. Martok’s three-fingered hands are trembling with excitement, so much that it takes him two tries to get the sash to stay, and the crest that runs down the center of his broad bald scalp is flushed a happy pink. “John!” Martok says again, then crouches so that his head is nearly level with John’s and spreads his arms wide. “Come to me, my friend! This has been a truly wondrous day!” John hesitates a bare moment, then sighs, crosses the tiny room in three strides, and steps into the gray’s crushing embrace. Martok lifts him, thick hands pressing John against the hairless, wrinkled skin of his chest, spins him half-around, and sets him down again with his back to the door. “Ask, John! You must ask!” John takes a deep breath in and lets it out slowly, mostly to make sure Martok hasn’t cracked his ribs in his exuberance, then says, “Please tell me, Martok. What wondrous thing did you find in the markets today?” He’s expecting to hear something about a new sash, or a refurbished handheld, or perhaps a particularly ripe piece of fruit. Consequently, he has no idea how to react when Martok says, “A home, John! I have found us a home!” *** The intricacies of the grays’ economic system have never been remotely clear to John. What education he received in the crèche was mostly structured around learning ways to serve a future patron in practical ways. He was taught to cook, to clean, and to shoot (small-caliber weapons only, sufficient for hunting native game, but not remotely suited for penetrating the leathery, three-centimeter-thick hide of a gray). He knows there are some humans at work in the markets. He’s seen them there from time to time, has even seen Martok forced to barter with one of them on a few occasions. Whatever arcane knowledge of debit and credit that those humans have gained, however, did not come from the crèche, and Martok has never shown the slightest interest in passing along to John any small understanding of economics that he might have. Buy the Book After The Fall Edward Ashton Buy Book After The Fall Edward Ashton Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget John has seen enough, though, to know one thing for certain: He and Martok are poor. If he’s being honest with himself, that much was clear to him even on the day Martok took him away from the crèche. John was not one of the children who lined up eagerly to show off their skills for the grays who came by shopping for a bond. He was small for his age, with a high, piping voice and a slight stammer that came and went, with timing seemingly designed to maximize his embarrassment. Awkward with his peers and mostly terrified of the grays, John hung back as far as the nursemaids would let him when visitors came to the crèche—and as a consequence, he was passed over, time after time after time. He still remembers the moment when he realized that he was dooming himself. He was twelve, and a girl named Tila had just aged out without a bond and been unceremoniously put down in the alley behind the crèche. As one nursemaid heaved her body into the refuse bin and two others herded the children back into the building, it struck him suddenly, with the force of a physical blow: That’ll be me someday. By the time Martok came by, John was, strictly speaking, already past the age where he should have been declared permanently un-bonded. The only reason he was still there, the only reason that the nursemaids kept shoving him out in front of every gray who came by, was that he was still small enough to pass, and the nursemaids in his crèche, despite their general indifference and occasional cruelty, didn’t actually enjoy putting humans down. Martok has never said exactly how the two of them wound up walking out of that place together, but John strongly suspects that when the nursemaids realized that Martok was just window-shopping, that he didn’t have enough credit for the processing fee, let alone for the purchase of a bond, they offered up John for precisely what he was worth—which is to say, for nothing at all. *** “I don’t understand,” John says. “A home? Isn’t this our home?” “This? A home?” Martok crosses over to the pantry in two short strides, reaches inside to pull out a protein brick, and tears off a bite half the size of John’s head. “This squalid hovel?” He gestures broadly with the hand holding the brick, spraying crumbs from both his hand and his thick, wrinkled lips in an arc half the size of the room. “This cramped, wretched hole? No, John. This is no home. This is a place of bare subsistence, sufficient only to keep our heads dry and our bodies warm as we wait for the gods of fate to hand us the opportunity that we have been awaiting.” He takes another bite, chews, and swallows. “And now, my friend? Now they have.” Martok drops onto the big bed that takes up a quarter of the room’s floor space, pops the remainder of the protein brick into his mouth, and then flops backward with his hands folded behind his head. “We leave this place tomorrow. I shall settle accounts with our twice-cursed landlord once we’ve had our breakfasts—it wouldn’t do to tell him before he’s fed us one last time, of course—and we shall be on our way. I have already secured a trundlecar to take us as far as the central terminal. From there, I’ve booked passage to the terminus at Lake Town.” John waits a beat for him to go on, then says, “Lake Town? That’s where we’re going?” John has never seen Lake Town. He’s never seen much of anywhere, honestly, other than the bits and pieces of Farhome, the city that still houses nearly eighty percent of the grays on the planet, that Martok has seen fit to show him. He’s heard of Lake Town, though. It’s the farthest western extension of the grays’ footprint on this world, a barely populated outpost on the southern shore of a mostly frozen freshwater sea. He’s not sure what sort of home Martok might have found there, but he’s hard-pressed to imagine that it could be any better than this place. “Oh no,” Martok says, his chest rumbling with laughter. “Lake Town is a terribly depressing place, John—a refuge for miscreants and ne’er-do-wells who have been driven from the more polite society of Farhome, mostly for perfectly good reasons. I spent two thoroughly unpleasant years there when I first made landfall on this world, and I have no interest in ever returning. Lake Town is not our destination. It is simply the farthest extent of the transport network. I intend to stay there for the shortest time that we can possibly manage.” “Oh,” John says, then reaches up to scratch the back of his head. “I’m confused.” Martok sits up again, and his lips fold back from his thick, square teeth and two stubby upturned tusks in a parody of a grin. “As well you might be. You would not know this from our time together, John, but I was not always the soft city dweller that you see now. Years ago, I was considered quite the adventurer, and I expect that experience will serve us well now. Upon reaching Lake Town, we shall strike out southward, away from the lakeshore. Our destination is some fifty kilometers along, over hill and bramble, across rill and stream, and through trackless wilderness.” He leans back, and the bed groans as his weight settles onto his elbows. “As I have already implied, I had a most fortuitous meeting in the markets today. In particular, I met a worthless scion of the Greatfoots, a distant descendant of the Chief Administrator himself—Daro Lia née Greatfoot by name. It seems this wretch had acquired a great deal of property beyond the reach of polite society, south and west of Lake Town in what was once an agricultural region of sorts. He purchased this property not because he had the slightest idea what to do with it, of course, but merely as a speculative investment. Such follies are common among the more useless members of the wealthier clans, you know. They have abundant credit, but they lack the wit to imagine how to invest it usefully. It seems he had some idea that Lake Town was due to expand greatly, and that when it did, he would be in a position to profit massively.” With that, Martok gets to his feet again and begins pacing—a singularly unsatisfying thing to do in such a tiny space, but John knows by now that when Martok is excited about something, he has a great deal of trouble holding still. “This ignorant Greatfoot has such an impoverished imagination that he could see no use for land such as this beyond the construction of more of what we already see around us. When it became clear, as it should have been from the outset, that no expansion in the direction of Lake Town was in the offing, he had no ability to see other possible avenues of progress.” He stops pacing then and turns to face John, arms spread wide. After a moment’s hesitation, John hazards, “But… you did see some such opportunity?” “Yes!” Martok says, and starts pacing again. “Of course! I am no failed third nephew of a wealthy clan, John. All my life, I have had to earn my way by my wits, and as this dullard poured out his tale of woe over a half-full tankard, I could already see what he could not. I let him ramble on for an hour or more, and then, my voice dripping with sympathy and fellow-feeling, I offered, strictly as a favor to both him and his noble clan, to relieve him of the burden of his misbegotten investment.” Martok seems about to burst with self-satisfaction. John, though, is beginning to feel a familiar, gnawing unease. This isn’t the first time that Martok has had a brilliant idea, one sure to bring him the wealth and acclaim that he clearly deserves. A quick glance around their squalid room tells the tale of how those other opportunities ended. “So…” John says. “This Greatfoot, he just… gave you the title to this property?” That stops Martok’s pacing again, and when he turns to face John, his face has lost some of its smugness. The gnawing in John’s belly turns abruptly into a sharp, stabbing pain. “Well, no. Of course not. Even a decadent Greatfoot dandy would not be foolish enough to simply hand over an opportunity like this to one he’d just met, would he?” John closes his eyes and breathes in, then out slowly. When he opens them again, Martok’s gaze has dropped to the floor between them. “Martok?” John says. “What did you give him?” “Well,” Martok says. “Nothing, really. A pledge, only. He was in such desperation to be rid of the property that he lent me the credit to take it from him. I had only to pledge him collateral.” Collateral? John’s eyes sweep the room. Everything Martok owns is here. What could he have… Oh gods. “Martok?” John says, slowly, evenly. “Did you… no, you couldn’t have. Please tell me you didn’t pledge him my bond?” Martok turns away, flops back onto the bed, and covers his face with his arms. “What does it matter what I pledged? I tell you truly, John. At the rate he offered me, this property will pay for itself a thousand times over.” John drops back into his seat by the window and buries his face in his hands. His heart seems to be trying to pound its way out of his chest, and when he speaks again, his voice is trembling. “When is the first repayment due to him, Martok?” “Sixty days,” Martok says. “An eternity, really.” John knows the answer to his next question, but he asks anyway. “And do you have it? Do you have enough credit even to cover the first payment?” Martok doesn’t answer. Outside the window, the crows have given up on what remains of the carcass in the road and have fallen to fighting among themselves over a hunk of protein brick that’s been dropped by a passing gray. John closes his eyes again and breathes in, breathes out. After the Fall. Copyright © 2026 by Edward Ashton. All rights reserved. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>After The Fall</i> by Edward Ashton appeared first on Reactor.

News Fallout How Fallout Season 2 Avoided Making a New Vegas Ending Canon Fallout Season 2 avoided committing to one of New Vegas’ optional endings (at least for now) By Matthew Byrd | Published on February 4, 2026 Photo: Prime Video Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Prime Video Note: This article contains spoilers for Fallout Season 2. Fallout Season 2’s showrunners did indeed fulfill their promise of not canonizing one of Fallout: New Vegas’ optional endings, though the season’s final episode raises some new questions about how long they can keep dancing around the series’ canon.  As we’ve previously discussed, Prime Video’s Fallout series is considered to be a canonical entry in the greater Fallout video game franchise. The show is set about 10 years after the most recent Fallout game (Fallout 4), which theoretically affords the showrunners plenty of space to tell their own story without having to connect quite so many dots along the way.  In reality, the situation has never been quite so clean. The Fallout franchise is not only notorious for refusing to clearly answer certain questions about the events that transpired before and between its various entries, but some of the games allow players to essentially pick their own endings based on the choices they make along the way.  Because many of the Fallout games take place in different regions across a fairly long timeline, those optional endings are rarely an issue. However, Fallout Season 2 is set in and around the New Vegas area, which means that it seemingly had to address what actually happened in the 2010 game, Fallout: New Vegas. Specifically, the show seemingly had to commit to one of Fallout: New Vegas’ four major optional endings: Ending 1 – The player sides with the Caesar’s Legion faction. The Legion conquers the area and forces the New California Republic to retreat.  Ending 2 – The player sides with the New California Republic. The NCR reclaims New Vegas and the surrounding wasteland.  Ending 3 – The player goes their own way and essentially rules over New Vegas with the help of a Securitron robot known as Yes Man.  Ending 4 – The player helps Mr. House take control of New Vegas and drive both the NCR and Caesar’s Legion from the wasteland.  There are further optional variations between those endings, but ultimately, only one faction could rule over New Vegas at the end of the day. Because Fallout Season 2 is set about 15 years after the events of Fallout: New Vegas, surely the show would have to tell us what actually happened at the end of that game, right? Right? Well, not exactly. At first, it felt like Fallout Season 2 was going to canonize the Mr. House ending. After all, Robert House is one of the season’s biggest villains, and his continued existence (even if he’s only shown via a TV screen in the “present” timeline) suggests that he must have survived long enough to retain control over New Vegas. The fact that the Legion and NCR are a shadow of their former selves in that region also supports the idea that neither took control over the New Vegas area at the end of the game.  However, the final episode of Fallout Season 2 sees The Ghoul finally confront the digitized version of Mr. House in New Vegas. House informs The Ghoul that it’s “good to be alive again” and notes that “wandering travellers” have tried to assassinate him in various ways over the years. The Ghoul cuts House off before he can elaborate on that fascinating tidbit, but House’s point is made all the same. There is at least the suggestion that he did not survive and thrive following the events of New Vegas’ ending but rather rebooted himself as some kind of fail safe sometime after.  For their part, the Prime Video Fallout creative team not only refuses to commit to a clear answer but suggests that the ambiguity of that scenario is very much the point.  “Oftentimes, it’s intentional that things are up for interpretation, and we have our own view of things that, you know, this series is gonna go on for a while yet,” says Fallout producer Todd Howard in a recent interview. “But I think it’s good to open up those conversations, and you may get history, you may get conflicting reports on how some things went.” Ah, the old “Eh, who can say?” explanation that sometimes seems to have become increasingly popular since The Force Awakens suggested that people conveniently forgot about the events of the original Star Wars trilogy in a record amount of time. Though the suggetion that we’re simply only getting one (possibly inaccurate) side of the story is designed to be hard to dispute, it has already started arguments among fans about whether a non-answer is really an answer at all. Said arguments are fuelled by the ways the show otherwise seemingly alters other parts of the Fallout canon or teases answers to previously intentionally ambiguous questions. For instance, Fallout Season 2 introduces the former President of the United States as a character, and the season finale suggests that he and the Enclave may have been the ones who started the Great War. Showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet suggests she doesn’t see things “that way” and that they really only want to “open the question” about the Enclave and the President’s involvement. Such plot points are, perhaps, red herrings disguised as revelations. Continuously playing with fire regarding what did and did not happen prior to the events of the Fallout TV series is undoubtedly a dangerous game. Along with the risk of providing the “wrong” answers in the minds of some (which can sometimes mean providing any answers at all), there is the risk of continuously teasing reveals that can never really be delivered. But with Fallout Season 3 already in pre-production, it seems that the series will have plenty of time to see where it fits into the greater Fallout universe while telling its own (so far largely compelling) stories. Ultimately, perhaps there is no greater constant in the Fallout universe than ambiguity. [end-mark] The post How <i>Fallout</i> Season 2 Avoided Making a <i>New Vegas</i> Ending Canon appeared first on Reactor.

News The Exorcist Chiwetel Ejiofor Joins Mike Flanagan’s Exorcist Movie Perhaps he will be the one doing some exorcising? By Molly Templeton | Published on February 4, 2026 Screenshot: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Netflix The horrors are coming along nicely. In 2024, Mike Flanagan signed on for a new Exorcist film—one that was originally assumed to be the follow-up to David Gordon Green’s poorly received The Exorcist: Believer. But Flanagan is instead doing his own thing. In November, Scarlett Johansson signed on to star in a film that is reportedly a “radical new take” on the Exorcist franchise, set in the same universe as the 1973 original. It was previously announced that Johansson will be joined by Jacobi Jupe (Hamnet), who plays her child, and Diane Lane, whose role remains unknown. One is tempted, of course, to assume that young Jupe will wind up possessed, in keeping with the plot of the original film, but one actually knows nothing at all. Perhaps this time it’s a mother facing possession. Flanagan, who is writing and directing, is not exactly known for taking the most straightforward options. Now we’ve got one more star in a mysterious role: Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Old Guard, Children of Men) has also joined the cast, reuniting him with his Life of Chuck director. (Flanagan does love to reuse his ensemble!) According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Sources say the actor will be playing an ex-con turned priest.” The Exorcist is expected to begin production in New York City next month. It’s set to begin haunting theaters on March 12, 2027.[end-mark] The post Chiwetel Ejiofor Joins Mike Flanagan’s <i>Exorcist </i>Movie appeared first on Reactor.

Books Reading the Weird Plan B From Outer Space: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster (Part 11) Mareva deals with the cosmic apocalypse in the conclusion of Sister, Maiden, Monster By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on February 4, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 29-30 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead! Erin sprouts a new growth from her temple: “a shiny gray-headed protrusion about the size of a golf ball.” Mar worries. Erin may be a monster now, but she still sometimes reveals the old Erin. Erin summons Mar to a toolshed rendezvous. Savannah’s asleep with baby dodecapod Gregory curled around her. Mar feels guilty about her unmotherly repulsion. Surely the helpless creature deserves better than Savannah. Erin, she sees with horror, has clawed off her temple growth, exposing her brain. A gray umbilical cord trails from the wound to a jellylike blob cradled in her taloned hand. She growls that she can’t “ascend” with the “memories” this “cerebryo” holds, and she forces Mar to swallow it. Two images flash through Mar’s mind: a coffee can holding an antique key and a hidden keyhole in a basement wall. Erin instructs her to use the key when “the stars are right.” What’s behind the wall will enable Mar to choose her future, though neither choice will be “benign.” Next morning Mar wakes to Savannah cursing out “Michael” for not warning her that the “Cleaving” was imminent. Now she can’t get a proper supply of scalpels and sutures. What’s the Cleaving? Better Mar doesn’t know the details. Just stay inside today, especially after sundown. From her room, Mar watches Savannah haul cutlery and tarps into the barn. Her labors done, Savannah collapses with Gregory. From the barn come Archivist screams, “at once dreadful and thrilling.” Mar finds the monsters “rutting into each other… and slashing themselves open with knives.” Erin leads the “grisly congregation” in a litany about “existing in and with one another,” and rising to the “Mother of All” by escaping “the forms of this world.” As the Archivists staple and stitch each other together, Mar realizes what the Cleaving is. From Erin’s memories, she now knows Dr. Shapiro’s whereabouts, but also knows she can’t escape the manor yet. On the sixth morning after the Cleaving, tremors shake Mar awake. A gigantic sky-hole opens over the city, a portal to a huge ringed planet. A massive space ship emerges. With Erin screaming that it’s time to “join our masters in the star shadows,” the fused Archivists fly to the ship. Savannah sighs that one day she’ll get her own wings. Mar asks if all the humans are dead. Savannah doesn’t know. Regardless, it’s just Mar and Savannah and Gregory now—at least until Mar has more squiddos. * * * With the Archivists gone, Erin’s memories “blossom” in Mar’s mind. She sneaks into the manor basement, finds the antique key and a keyhole hidden behind a switchplate. The key triggers a wall to slide back, revealing a wood-paneled study like what “a wealthy, educated gentleman of yesteryear” would have built. From the LED lights in the gas fixtures and some modern books among the aged esoteric tomes, she figures Mayne updated the place. There’s also a vinyl record on top of a turntable. On its cover is a strange yellow symbol and the title Into the Hands of the Living God. A “dreadful urge” makes her play the record. Atonal music sounds from a solo violin, and Mar lapses into vision. She’s standing above a wave-swept lake. Overhead shine three moons, twin suns, and three black stars. The starlight drives her to “transcendent darkness.” Footsteps approach. Through tears she sees a figure dressed in yellow robes. His face is “blank, pale,” but he says he wears no mask. He’s come to show Mar her future. At his touch, she’s transported a millennium forward. The Mayne manor’s gone; in its place is a “shuddering amorphous mass of gray-white flesh,” over which crawl monsters that pull “squirming larvae” from its numberless birthing sacs. The blob’s only feature is a vast maw lined with humanish teeth, which the monsters constantly feed. It’s what Mar will become, the yellow-clad stranger says: Earth’s “new fertility deity. All powerful yet helpless. Wise yet mindless. Revered and yet an abomination.” Mar begs the stranger to kill her, but even he can’t overcome the immortality imposed by his “adversaries.” But he offers a choice. If she accepts the gift he’ll leave for her, she’ll have no more offspring. She’ll prevent the repopulation of Earth and be free to live out her immortality as she chooses, in a world “silent but for the wind in the trees and the waves crashing upon the empty shores, just as [he wishes] it to be.” Waking in the study, Mar finds a ring carved from human bone and inlaid with the Yellow Sign. When she puts it on, it sinks spikes into her bone, becoming immovable. At once she feels her embryo cysts subsiding. “Hallelujah,” she whispers. Savannah’s “scared and furious.” She can’t pull the ring off, but a meat cleaver should do the job. Mar punches Savannah unconscious, strength enhanced by the ring. But she can’t murder her jailer. Instead she hurries to pack. Leaving, she sees Gregory sleeping in his aquarium-crib. She has three choices. She can leave him with Savannah. She can euthanize him (but how?). Or— Mar steels herself to pick up Gregory. His red skin is covered with velvety silver fuzz. He’s warm and just slightly squishy. A little fishy-smelling. But his eyes are blue, like Leila’s. Though her “rat brain” tells her she knows nothing about babies, human or alien, her “superstitious mind” tells her to have faith—she’ll figure this out. She asks Gregory if he wants to come look for Dr. Shapiro. He yawns and garbles: “Agafa!” She’ll take that as a yes. What’s Cyclopean: “Cleaving” is an autoantonym: it means both cutting apart and binding together. Boy howdy, does it ever mean both of those things this week. Libronomicon: Mark Mayne’s secret office has been repurposed, but still contains High Performance Habits and High Growth Habits. Neither of those seems particularly useful at this stage of world history, unless you use very different definitions of “high,” “performance,” and “growth.” Of course, Mareva doesn’t open them, so maybe they are about reshaping your body to ascend into the stars, and/or to grow eldritch infants. Weirdbuilding: Wave hello to Erich Zann and the King in Yellow. Madness Takes Its Toll: “On drugs” is not really necessary at this point to explain Savannah’s mania. Or her suggestion to Mareva that “psychologically, ignorance is your friend”. Anne’s Commentary In the “Acknowledgements” for Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy Snyder thanks Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon for soliciting “Magdala Amygdala” for their Dark Faith: Invocations anthology. She adds a special thank you to Broaddus for sending her favorite editorial acceptance ever: “Lucy, what the fuck is wrong with you? Good grief that story was messed up. Thanks. I think.” About the novel that grew out of “Magdala Amygdala” and Savannah’s origin story, “My Knowing Glance,” I’d like to echo Broaddus’s sentiments. I’m sure that he doesn’t really assume dark fiction writers must be deranged. I’m sure he didn’t really think “Magdala Amygdala” was “messed up,” except in a good way. As Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre, messing around in the darkest recesses of one’s own—and one’s reader’s—mind is legitimate practice: “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.” Snyder does plenty of terrifying and horrifying in Sister, Maiden, Monster, but I’ve got to say it’s in the sheer volume, inventiveness and outright unabashedness of her body horror that the novel excels. “Body horror” is the polite term for “gross-out,” right? And it encompasses sexual horror as well as guts-and-gore and miscellaneous biological ickinesses? Or put sexual horror in its own category, if you prefer, in which case S, M, M excels in both categories, and also in the subcategory of reproductive horror. Gregory’s birth may outdo the C-section via vampire teeth in Breaking Dawn. But in a good way: it’s kind of neat that the Mother of Calamities can do her own c-sections. At least until she evolves into an amorphous gray mass without any limbs to wield scalpel-claws. Fortunately, by that time she’ll have birthed enough squiddos to serve as midwives, “pulling squirming larvae from fleshy sacs that rupture like boils.” No, nuh-uh, I cannot—this is Dr. Pimple Popper on a cosmic scale. In her final form, I just realized, Mar must look like a protoshoggoth in labor. Or even like Azathoth Itself, given the King in Yellow’s description of this final metamorphosis as a terrible deification in which Mar would become a “living god,” but also “All-powerful yet helpless. Wise yet mindless. Revered and yet an abomination.” Given the looseness of abomination nomenclature in the Cthulhu Mythos, it’s difficult to exactly categorize the entities using Snyder’s PVG virus to transform Earth into their latest breeding colony. Erin and Savannah refer to the deities they see in their visions as the “old gods” and describe them as “whispering to me from their thrones in the dark spaces between the stars.” My first impression is that their “old gods” are the primal and ultimate entities more “properly” referred to as the Outer Gods: Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath and Nyarlathotep are those best “known” to humans, though “unknowable.” In a letter to James F. Morton, Lovecraft wrote that “Great Old One” Cthulhu is the offspring of Nug, who is the offspring of Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath. The prominence of cephalopod-like creatures among Mar’s present and future offspring suggests that it may be Cthulhu and his minions who are taking over Earth. This makes Mythosian sense given Derleth’s claim that Cthulhu and Hastur are half-brothers embroiled in eternal rivalry. One of Hastur’s principal manifestations is the King in Yellow, whose sigil is the Yellow Sign. Erin first sees the Yellow Sign in the hospital where she’s recovering from her initial bout with PVG; it’s set into the pavement of a courtyard. Staring at the weird symbol, Erin’s transported in vision to the Mayne manor, which she senses is a “keep fit for a king. Or a living god.” As Erin’s transforming into a winged Archivist, she again hears the “old gods” whispering, but she also hears a “faint, insistent whisper in the castle manor.” Somehow she knows her new masters wouldn’t approve of her listening to the second whisperer, but she cherishes it as her “special secret.” What’s in the manor basement is a hidden study where Mar will find a vinyl album emblazoned with the Yellow Sign and titled Into the Hands of the Living God. Listening to the record delivers Mar to a lake under twin suns, triplet moons, and black stars: Carcosa and Hali, where the King in Yellow will offer her an alternative to eternal squiddo production. Mar only discovers the hidden study through the memories which Erin literally feeds her before the Cleaving. Erin has to get rid of these memories in order to ascend, because they are associated with her secret alliance to the King, aka Cthulhu’s fraternal enemy Hastur, and it’s to the Team Cthulhu spaceship that the Archivists will joyfully flock. So the King in Yellow must have been plotting all along to sabotage Cthulhu’s Earth takeover by luring Mar, Cthulhu’s Mater Calamitas, to Team Hastur! Whew. The tortuous plot makes sense at last, or at least this is the sense I make of it. It’s a narrative road it has been well-worth following despite (or sorta because of) the frequent gooey patches! Ruthanna’s Commentary This has been a wild book. I have to confess, “birth control provided by the King in Yellow” was not on my bingo card. I’m glad they have Plan B in lost Carcosa. Even if they have it mostly because they prefer lifeless orbs to elder god remodeling styles. Planetary cancer or lunar desert? You decide! It’s not actually as bad as lunar desert, though. Humans have gotten purged, but as far as I can tell there was no universal slaughter of cows, platypuses, or pine trees. And the ocean is already full of mutated dodecapods. So with things not being overrun by cancer babies (doo de doo dah doo doo de doo, dah doo), there’s a solid foundation for ecosystem preservation and regrowth. Unless the King in Yellow has further plans, always possible. Erin dreamed of a god-king palace in the hills. Mayne Mansion doesn’t quite measure up – no god-kings here, as of the book’s end. So is Savannah going to set herself up as a death goddess? Or will it become a Carcosan monument? Given the secret interdimensional musical passage in the basement, I’m betting the latter. The door is open. Things can pass through in both directions. I’m betting the next thing through, when she wakes up, will be Savannah—and if she doesn’t get swatted for threatening the King, what will her gift look like? Ohhhhhh. Were the Carcosans also guiding the feds, suggesting sigils and processes most unhelpful for the elder gods’ long-term plans? That would explain a lot. We originally picked this book because I wanted something with all the angry queer girl cooties ever. Snyder has delivered in spades. Coming down to the end, I’m fascinated by our trinity of angry queer girls: Erin: lesbian (her sexually unexciting “fiancé” turns out to be an unfortunately-repressed egg; her passion is for Betty), angry about the kyriarchy and how she’s been pushed into a generic story about what you’re supposed to want. Archivist, accepts her eldritch “gifts” but doesn’t let the gods entirely override her human values or desires. Ultimate fate: cuts out her human values and gives them to Mareva, “cleaves” with Betty, ascends to join the biblically accurate abomination. Savannah: bi, angry about the kyriarchy and abuse. Culler and bodyguard, accepts her destiny and gives up her pre-existing morals (which she did seem to have, briefly) in favor of homicidal hedonism. Ultimate fate: uncertain. Maybe Carcosan gifts, maybe punishment for failing her mission, maybe ascension and new worlds where she can play slasher. Or maybe she’ll wander the barren earth, looking for things to kill so she can get one more orgasm. Mareva: ace, angry about how kyriarchy and abuse have fucked over her family in particular, and about the expectation that women (she and her sister in particular) should reduce themselves to brood mares just because gods say so. Intended to be the mindless magna mater, but holds onto her morals. Refuses her shitty destiny with Erin’s help. Ultimate fate: Immortal and unkillable, wandering what remains of Earth with baby Gregory, looking for food and shelter and survivors. I’m rooting for Mareva, and maybe even Gregory, and against all the super-kyriarchical powers trying to remake Earth in their preferred images. And for more messed-up stories from Snyder. Next week, we travel under other dangerous skies, populated by other leather-winged monsters, in Caitlin Kiernan’s “A Travelogue for Oneironautics.” You can find it in her Bright Dead Star collection. Then in two weeks, join us for our new longread: Stephen Graham Jones’ Buffalo Hunter Hunter![end-mark] Buy the Book Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones Buy Book Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The post Plan B From Outer Space: Lucy Snyder’s <i>Sister, Maiden, Monster</i> (Part 11) appeared first on Reactor.