News Keanu Reeves Keanu Reeves in Talks to Star in Lego Live-Action Hybrid Movie But will Reeves be a minifig? By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 22, 2026 Screenshot: Lionsgate Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Lionsgate Keanu Reeves (pictured above as an angel in 2025’s Good Fortune) recently reprised his voice for the character Duke Caboom in Toy Story 5, and the actor is eyeing another movie that will include animation and toys as main characters. The movie in question is a Lego feature at Universal that will contain a mix of animation and live action. According to Deadline, Reeves is in talks to star in such a film with Josh Cooley, who wrote and directed Toy Story 4, at the helm. The project is the first in a deal Universal signed with The Lego Group to create three live-action films based on the plastic building blocks. It’s not clear whether Reeves will be lending his voice to a Lego character or if his entire body will be on screen for live-action acting. What we do know, according to Deadline, is that the movie will revolve around Reeves’ character, whatever form that may take, and that the studio is courting him to be the centerpiece of a Lego feature. Reeves is reportedly warming up to the idea. Other than that, details are slim! That doesn’t mean we can’t conjecture: Will Reeves be playing a John Wick-esque dude with crazy fighting skills? Or will he be more like his Toy Story character, the Canadian daredevil Duke Caboom? Or perhaps (probably) will he play a completely different character? Who knows! What we do know is that any Lego movie that comes to pass will be the latest installment in a burgeoning franchise that started with 2014’s animated feature, The Lego Movie. Those films came out at Warner Bros., and this live-action/animation movie from Universal appears to be a different iteration on the IP. Fingers crossed we’ll get more news about the Keanu Reeves Lego film soon, including who Reeves will be playing (assuming, of course, that the deal moves forward).[end-mark] The post Keanu Reeves in Talks to Star in Lego Live-Action Hybrid Movie appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Death of Robin Hood The Death of Robin Hood Brings a Legend Low It’s not the first time someone has tried to insert realism into a Robin Hood story… but it might be nice if it were the last. By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on June 22, 2026 Credit: A24 Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: A24 I never read Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood when I was a kid, but my partner adored it, and so I’ve leafed through their tattered copy many times. The book is largely considered a cementing point in the status of Robin Hood as a folk hero rather than the morally flexible outlaw who often stole for his own gain, as the early ballads dictated. The epilogue of the book contains its own version of “Robin Hood his Death,” one of the oldest ballads on record—in it, Robin is betrayed by a prioress, his cousin, who deliberately botches the medieval blood-letting remedies of the time so that he slowly weakens and bleeds out. By the time Little John realizes something has gone wrong, he’s too late to save his friend. Robin asks for his bow and shoots a final arrow, telling Little John to bury him where it lands. The Death of Robin Hood is an adaptation, of sorts, of this ballad, and the idea of having a whole film dedicated to this story for the first time was an exciting prospect. That it was written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, who made a (deserved) name for himself with 2021’s Pig, was another vote in its favor. A star-studded but thoughtfully assembled cast certainly didn’t hurt either. So it’s a shame that the film paints an utterly morbid picture that feels like nothing so much as “what if Unforgiven and Logan were grafted onto Robin Hood”? It feels relevant to note that none of the more recent imaginings of the character hold up very well; the MGM series that premiered last year tried to zero in on Norman-Saxon tensions and keeps hoping Sean Bean’s Sheriff of Nottingham will legitimize their attempts; the 2018 film was a pointlessly grimmed up affair with A Knight’s Tale-style anachronisms it never earned; Ridley Scott’s “historically realistic” 2010 version was trying to capture the same vim Scott seized with Russell Crowe on Gladiator to decidedly damp results. It’s fair to say that there hasn’t been a truly great Robin Hood adaptation since Men in Tights. That’s over three decades of hoping and not much to show for it. The film opens with another attempt on the life of an elderly Robin Hood (Hugh Jackman). While stories have grown over the years, this Robin has no qualms about who he is: a brigand and a thief and a murderer, who only ever acted for this own gain and currently has nothing to show for it, hunted by the kin of the people he’s killed. He’s found by Little John (Bill Skarsgård), who used to run with him many years ago and is now living a completely new life—in a turn of luck, he had the chance to take over the life of a man he killed, and has been living as Edward, a farmer with a good wife and daughter. But some of the men who knew them have found John’s patch of peace and wrestled it from him. He needs Robin to help him get it back. This goes about as well as you’d expect, and Robin’s injuries from the fight lead John to drop him at the doorstep of an island priory run by Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), who is so good at healing that she’s rumored to be a witch. Brigid is a young woman who came to the island in the wake of losing her family, and has devoted her life to helping others. The island seems to have a pull all its own, across many generations and faiths. As Brigid helps Robin (who gives the name Randolph), they grow closer, and he also develops a friendship with the leper (Murray Bartlett) who tends the priory orchards after being saved by the sisterhood. But then John’s daughter, Little Margaret (Faith Delaney), shows up on the island without a father, and Robin knows that someone is likely to come after the girl to end the blood feuds once and for all. I found myself asking “Why does this need to be Robin Hood?” more than once during the film’s runtime, and I don’t think that the movie itself does a very good job at answering the question. This could have easily been a story about any outlaw of the period, and the suggestion that it inspired the ballads of Robin Hood later on might have been more riveting if the character were simply some guy. There was a way to make this connection deeper and get to the heart of key thoughts in the film’s script—namely questions surrounding the meaning of stories and who they serve—that didn’t require something so plain as “Yeah, so Robin Hood was absolutely real, but he was an asshole.” Half the purpose in making Robin Hood such an awful guy appears to be in service of pointing out how disgusting the past was. The fight sequences are built for dragged-out carnage, blood and bile and mud spilling out in all directions. The acknowledgment that killing before the advent of slick weaponry and sterile surgery rooms would be a nasty affair is a prolonged piece of the film’s worldbuilding. It’s aggressively fine, but also overplayed—once we’re aware that this is the reality we’re occupying, it stops being interesting to watch in a hurry. One of my greatest annoyances at films like this, the “Violent Man Comes to Terms With His Terrible Past and Either Makes Peace With It or Dies Trying” genre, is that there’s often very little reasoning or background given to who that man used to be. We’re dropped into the end of his story and supposed to care because… well, we’ve been conditioned to think that those sorts of men’s stories are important and that sometimes it even :gasp: takes a toll on him. But does anyone go to a Robin Hood story for that kind of twist? There are moments when it seems as though the experience might come together, when the script makes a beautiful or cogent point on occasion. One of those points is wrapped around the spirituality of places, the power of the land on this vast and beautiful planet we cling to. (The paganism in the film runs right alongside the Christianity, and I’m not sure how I feel about it mostly because I don’t think the film is doing nearly enough with that aspect. Robin Hood stories are tied up in Green Man mythologies, too, and I dearly wish that would come into play more often if we’re going old school.) And then there’s Murray Bartlett, casually being the MVP of most projects he wanders onto, there to be a friend, but also to let Robin know that we don’t often remember our own stories as accurately as we claim to—which makes tying ourselves too tightly to them a mistake. I do appreciate that most of the film is a ponderous, slow-moving affair—I just wish it had given itself better questions to ponder. (Honestly, dealing with personal mythologies and who stories are for and the pitfalls of narrative interpretation in a two hour film is a pretty tall order while Interview With the Vampire is tackling that same stable on television with agony, pathos, devastating cleverness, and a better runtime to do it in.) There are simpler complaints I’ve got, too, like the fact that Little Margaret is very much mirroring the relationship Wolverine has with X-23 in Logan, or the fact that there’s an aggravating suggestion of attraction between Robin and Brigid when Jodie Comer is a quarter century younger than her co-star. There’s a replication of Robin Hood’s final moments in the ballad here, reimagined with a prioress who is not his cousin and a little girl replacing her father at Robin’s side. And all the while, I was wondering why Robin needed to die at all—there doesn’t seem to be a reason other than that he would prefer to. Which is unfortunate because there is a moment further back in the film that suggests the title might be a sort of ruse… that Robin Hood might die, but a man named Randolph could go on living and help to raise the daughter of Edward the farmer in peace. But then I remember that in this story, Little John is called that because he joined Robin’s gang of brigands when he was a boy—he was literally little. And I realize that the choice to reinterpret such sharp little detail of an age-old tale with something so banal isn’t going to offer up such an interesting premise. We’re here for realism. For some reason, we often forget that realism is not the antithesis of story.[end-mark] The post <i>The Death of Robin Hood</i> Brings a Legend Low appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Vampire Lestat The Vampire Lestat Breaks Out the Power Ballads in “Toronto” “Mmm, performative journalism.” By Molly Templeton | Published on June 22, 2026 Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC The thing I love—well, one thing I love—about the vampire Lestat is that he is usually trying to be a very good boy. Yes, I do feel this way in part because I just reread Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, in which our hero explicitly rejects a religious definition of goodness and sets out to be good on his own. But this is true of his television counterpart as well.  The problem is that everyone is constantly projecting their own shit onto him. Dan thinks he’s a monster? Lestat will be a monster. Louis wants him to be how he was in the first season? Now the entire world thinks that’s who he is. Gabriella, Nicki, Magnus—oof, Magnus—Armand: they all have their versions of Lestat. He is wrestling with himself and his demons as much as he is with his “muses” and his mother.  And then when he finally gets a moment of his own version of bliss, well. You see how they react. But we’ll get there.  “Toronto” is an incredible hour of television. It’s a little overwhelming. It had me struggling to explain it. On second viewing it messed me up a bit. It’s smart and biting and densely packed with perfect dialogue, and it has the funniest ’80s parody music video I absolutely never expected to see in this show. And it does a ton of emotional heavy lifting. It is a good thing we are not trying to rank vampire emotional trauma because that would be a lot. And on the flip side, we have foreshadowed beheadings and alarming bathroom quickies. This is not an episode without any humor. When Daniel (my notes say Dan, since Lestat likes to needle him thusly) claims that Lestat owes him, since he saved Lestat’s life, the good doctor Fareed muses a bit on how long, exactly, a vampire as powerful as Lestat could survive without his head. For some vamps, not so long.  Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC And amid the hints of beheading, more hints about Daniel’s impending doom. I hate these hints. I think this show needs Eric Bogosian’s prickly New Yorker vibes, his impatience, even his tired tough journalist schtick. But Lestat says “He led a brief, incidental life as a vampire,” and I get very worried about him. There’s a line about Daniel’s hatred for Lestat being “watered in the sunlight later.” Eep. And yet: Lestat has regrets! Lestat probably has regrets about a lot more things than he’s letting on, but he straight-up says this about Daniel. Perhaps he’s saying this for the benefit of his imagined listener in the future. Or perhaps not. Either way, he plays Daniel like an electric violin. I’m going to watch this episode another time just to watch Sam Reid move through the twisty, elusive, entirely fake, absolutely convincing emotions he pulls off over the course of the “interview.” (Using scare quotes because the interviewer is at no point in control of the situation.) The return of the stuttering question and his faked upset about it, followed by a genuinely revealing series of answers about the stutter, followed by some less believable answers about how he rid himself of it—amid which are hints and outright revelations about the psyche of the young Mr. de Lioncourt. He pretends outrage and exhaustion and then speaks of watching witches burn with alarming detail. He remembers their names. He implicates Gabriella while she sits there, and then she runs off to fuck his body double.  And then Lestat talks about Nicki. “Nicolas de Lenfent, my first love.”  We have met Nicki before, in Armand’s memories, as Daniel points out. But Nicki feels fragile and precarious in Lestat’s telling: obsessed with music yet practical about his skills, squatting instead of paying rent, aware that his father would never send Lestat with kind messages of support. Nicki is troubled even before he’s kidnapped by Armand’s coven and used for snacks.  Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Nicki is even more of a mess after he becomes a vampire. But his story is tangled with so many other threads of Lestat’s story: with Armand; with Gabriella; with Magnus, Lestat’s maker, finally seen here in all his disastrous glory. Lestat spins and weaves his history, and it is never entirely clear if the story he’s telling Daniel is exactly the same as the version that we’re seeing on screen. By the time he gets to Magnus lip-syncing “Your Biggest Fan,” we are in truly astonishing territory. Lestat is portraying his maker as a needy, grasping, lovelorn fool, even as he refers to Magnus as his liberator. He hides his feelings about Magnus behind the story of Nicki, offering Daniel something real in one hand while keeping the other behind his back. “I carried the box because I destroyed him, Dan,” Lestat says of his souvenir of poor doomed Nicki. “I carried the box to remind me what I was capable of.” What he was capable of was love, if we’re being honest about it. He turned his mother because she was dying, and Nicki because he loved him, and Nicki wanted it. He gave people what they wanted: Gabriella the power to be more like her son, and Nicki his trust. He stopped lying. And it killed Nicki, eventually, yes. But Lestat didn’t do that. Armand did. (Here’s what I pause and say: In Lestat’s version, Armand did. In Lestat’s version, which happened after Gabriella went to coffin, so she cannot say otherwise. In Lestat’s version, in which he tells Gabriella that Louis doesn’t know about her, but then says to Daniel that he’s surprised Louis didn’t mention how much he spoke of her. He is trying to keep his dangerous, complicated loves apart, which is probably for the best. Gabriella and Louis is a slightly terrifying idea.) Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Armand’s love language is doing truly terrible things. Armand is a gremlin, but also an abused child given eternity. I think there’s a way where, in Armand’s mind, killing Claudia was doing Louis a favor. Setting him free. I’m sure that in Armand’s mind, that’s what he did for Lestat: set him free from a mistake gone awry. You could argue this is most vampires’ love language, maybe, but I think Armand has a notably strong tendency toward it. At any rate, the tangle of Lestat’s psyche is really on display here, though only for Daniel and—notably—Gabriella. Who is this story really for? Which listener does he really want to understand what happened with Nicki, what role Armand played, how it affected Lestat? It’s not a story for everyone, as his little prank reveals. Lestat plays this off like he was just fucking with Daniel, but this story was never for public consumption.  And yet before he walks off, he plays one last card, telling Daniel that the band tried to play a bigger venue, that they couldn’t fill it. He knows this perfectly well: “Unlike your last vampire, there are no delusions here.” I am saving all my commentary about Lestat’s rock star career and Lestat’s specific knowledge about music for the end, but this little bit made me sit up straight. Because it’s never been about being a rock star at all. The trappings are fun. The rest of it is feelings.  Meanwhile, Louis has gone on a little road trip. If ever you needed a reminder that the version of Louis that he presented to Daniel Molloy is not the complete Louis du Pont du Lac, well, here you go: Louis snarkily asking “Hey, you seen Killer?” as he murders his way through an entire coven of vampires singlehandedly. There is just ever so much we haven’t actually seen about this man. And yet, in keeping with the version of himself we do know, he frees the humans and directs them to a waiting car. (Possibly an Uber driver’s most alarming night.) Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC The show’s decision to twine Louis’ revenge with Lestat’s making is heavy and dark and so very, very fraught, and I think it works. It works as a commentary about bodily autonomy, and consent, and fear, and helplessness. It works because though we never see Claudia, for this whole scene, she is present. For as heavy as all of this is, we don’t have to actually see her go through what she went though. To hear her story in her words is enough. Instead of showing us, while Louis reads those torn-out diary pages, what we have already inferred, we see Lestat’s memories. And we see what happened to him.  This is not the tidy, “oh he’s my liberator,” flippant-about-Magnus’ suicide version of events. There is no voiceover. There is no filter. There is fear and prayer and horror, and Magnus telling him to “ask for it.” No wonder Lestat’s always on Daniel’s case about his transformational trauma. The show is not shy about an unwilling transformation being an invasion, an assault, a loss of bodily autonomy. “I hope one day he feels this, small and cornered, and crushed like a can,” Claudia wrote about Bruce. But it’s Lestat we see small and cornered. And yet—this is important—this never takes any of the horror or the import from Claudia’s story, and her telling of it. It is a reminder that one person’s trauma does not lessen another’s. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how the show pulled this off, why this works for me, when in a lesser series or movies I might have felt very differently. There are entirely too many stories about men avenging the terrible things done to women. But Louis sits there, and he channels Claudia, who has been dead for centuries, and it still feels like the moment belongs to her. (You could argue that he’s doing this for himself. But I think his following move suggests otherwise.) Lestat, in the past, screams, almost dies, and is reborn. None of them are unharmed, and they are all connected. It feels like the right way to tell this story; it doesn’t let you look away from either horror, but doesn’t turn it into something tawdry or gratuitous, either. The performances are fierce, the intensity off the charts. Now we know, too, why it made Lestat so mad, what Louis said about him and Claudia and the train.  “And he did win, ’cause I want nothing, to be nothing…” Louis reads from Claudia’s diary. Everyone responds to trauma differently. Lestat, you might say, wants everything.  The entire scene with Lestat and Magnus in the car is bitter and rank and loaded, Magnus speaking of, or for, all the muses, all the ghosts haunting Lestat, and this bit: “We eat your soul at the long table. 68 courses so far. We keep waiting for the bill, but the plates keep coming. And we keep asking ourselves, when is he going to make an album?” This—this!—is what makes Lestat snap and shout and roll the car. “WHEN WE ARE READY” yells Lestat, who was clearly not ready for what Magnus did to him all those years ago.  Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC He’s ready for the show, though. Lestat’s voiceover doesn’t come back in until he refers to you, the listener, in your gilded bathtub. Then begins my favorite part: “I couldn’t pretend anymore that we were a Ticketmaster must-have, or that I wasn’t having a nervous breakdown or that psychosis wasn’t the exhilarating, horrifying byproduct of romping and stomping around the hippocampus. But here’s the thing. I loved the music. I loved it. It was compelling me forward, pulling me through the perennial walls of my psyche. And I thought, why not ride it to blindness? ‘Cause it seemed possible this was the muddy bottom, and on the other side, a marble floor polished to the horizon. Music, in its purest expression, would make me worse and then make me better. Bring on the muses.” Lestat, on stage, is blissed out. Lestat has dropped musical references, admitted that he can’t sell bigger arenas, spoke of the agreement between artist and audience, and insisted that Daniel is missing the point of the tour: “It is not about asses on seats or streams on Pandora. It is about pure expression!” Lestat does not care if you think rock music is passe or uncool or anything at all. It is a direct expression of his chaotic mind, and it couldn’t be anything else. It had to be this: melodramatic, over the top, performative, loud, ironic-but-also-not, anthemic, sincere, collaborative, and performed live through a haze of (bloody) sweat. If you have never been overwhelmed, blissfully overwhelmed, by the sound at a loud show where the audience has become one big shrieking organism, you might not get it. But I hope you have. There’s a term for this feeling, which can come from other things, like your basketball team winning a championship after 53 years: “collective effervescence.” In that last concert scene, while Lestat sings “You can’t fuck away the loneliness / it’ll wait ’til you’re done / ’til you come / like a vampire,” his muses watch. They might better be called his ghosts. They are not part of the collective that is effervescing. The ones who’ve been projecting onto him all this time, well, they walk away. Gabriella, seeing her son be exactly who he is, turns away in what looks like disgust. Maybe just boredom. Magnus slinks out the back door; he isn’t the star of this song. Lestat has moved well beyond his maker. And Nicki stands there in the crowd looking more joyful than he ever has. The band looks joyful. It’s everything. (A side note: It’s possible that I will come to regret this extremely credulous reading of Lestat. I tend to be a very credulous viewer and reader: I want to believe what I’m being shown, especially when it is as intimate and fascinating and shifty as the way Lestat presents his story. I want to find the truth in it all, even if it’s not there. That tendency toward credulous reading is part of why I love so very much the overtness of this show’s storytelling: that everyone’s version of events is different, every take is subjective, every story spun and respun and told and retold. I believed Louis, and now I believe Lestat. I don’t really believe Armand very often, but we have been shown good reason to be skeptical of Armand’s takes.)  Meanwhile, Louis has driven all the way back to New York City to visit the waitress Regina again, and of course it’s as Lestat sings “don’t worship that grave / dug on your own / don’t burn alone” that we see him looking at not-Claudia like that, after all this time. Lestat is exorcising his ghosts. Louis is very much haunted by his. “Toronto” could have ended on Lestat whispering, “Perfection.” But no! We’ve lost track of Alex. Who is at a meeting in a small town, talking about how the band he’s not presently on tour with is blowing up. You’re gonna hear about them soon. If you don’t get EATEN by the wide-eyed VAMPIRE GREMLIN in your midst, anyway. The long, long pan from that voice saying “I’ll share” to the camera actually landing on Armand—sorry, Arun? That was a vicious tease, and I loved it. I am rather worried about our second guitarist, here, and yes, it has something to do with one detail on that poster that I will leave for you to notice for yourself.  We have just been reminded, though, that Armand has a habit of doing terrible things out of love.  LITTLE SIPS Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Lestat’s pajama-pants vibe in the interview!!!! The extremely clear way in which Christine hates Gabriella, and the equally clear way in which Gabriella does not care. Bless you, Christine, you are extremely good at your job, even when it involves finding very discreet cleaning crews who are probably paid large amounts of cash. Somebody on this bus has to know what time zone they’re in. Interesting that there have been other, offscreen attempts on Lestat’s life.  The POSSUM. The reference to one of the vamps getting another possum and then it EATS HIS FACE. Good job, lil buddy. “That’s what moms did with kids before Lego and Peppa Pig.”  So our boy told Gabriella that he told Louis she was dead, but then he wonders, to Daniel, why Louis never said anything about her, after Lestat had spoken of her at length. I think he’s just trying to keep those two apart. I think he knows that Gabriella and Louis would be terrifying together.  The Great Conversion, according to Lestat, is “fucking stupid.” Noted! One certainly wonders if Armand saying “I love you, Lestat” is embellishment for the benefit of Armand’s fledgling.  I was lightly distracted in the coven basement because I just feel like someone playing 1000 seat venues would not have that many posters available. Why are these dirtbag coven vamps so into Armand, anyway? And what are all those pages? From the book, maybe? We have not seen the last of Baby Jenks. Louis was most definitely lying about his relationship with Lemuel if the single thing Lemuel asks, after calling his lover, is “Safe?” Phew, those two.  I am still thinking about the connection between the three artworks Lestat namechecks: Raphael’s Three Graces, Brancusi’s Bird in Space, and Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Any theories? [end-mark] The post <i>The Vampire Lestat</i> Breaks Out the Power Ballads in “Toronto” appeared first on Reactor.

News Klara and the Sun Jenna Ortega Wants to Be Your Artificial Friend in Klara and the Sun Trailer The movie from Taika Waititi is an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s book of the same name By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 22, 2026 Screenshot: Sony Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Sony Pictures Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun is actually happening, and Sony Pictures released a trailer today giving us our first glimpse of Jenna Ortega as Klara, as well as the rest of the cast, including Mia Tharia as Josie, the young human who chooses Klara, and Amy Adams as Josie’s concerned mother. Here’s the official synopsis: Klara and the Sun introduces audiences to Klara, an Artificial Friend who wants nothing more than to find the perfect home. When Klara meets Josie, each immediately senses a kindred spirit in the other. Josie has a fraught relationship with her mother and they’ve suffered great loss, but Klara’s innocent wonder and unwavering loyalty begin to heal the family and bring light to Josie’s complicated world. Today’s trailer introduces us to all these characters, as well as Natasha Lyonne as the store manager where Josie buys Klara, and a brief shot of Steve Buscemi as well. Overall, it seems to hew to Ishiguro’s story, though it’s hard to say for sure based on a single trailer and a high-level synopsis. While story details aren’t clear, we do know that the script comes from Waititi and Dahvi Waller (Mad Men, Halt and Catch Fire), and that the film is set to premiere in theaters on October 23, 2026. While we wait for more info, check out the first trailer for Klara and the Sun below. [end-mark] The post Jenna Ortega Wants to Be Your Artificial Friend in <i>Klara and the Sun</i> Trailer appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews Death Becomes Her: Decomposition Book by Sara Van Os Mahvesh Murad reviews a genre-bending meditation on loneliness by Sara Van Os. By Mahvesh Murad | Published on June 22, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Savannah is recuperating at her parents’ lake house in upstate New York, in the winter after a breakdown during her last year at uni. There was a traumatic event that included a breakup with her best friend. Now Savannah is trying to deal with that and with her unmedicated OCD in isolation, with the help of far too much wine dangerously mixed with a nightly sedative.  A few months prior to this, Ava went on a camping trip with her colleagues Megan and Chad in the Adirondacks. Chad’s “competitive masculinity” takes them off the trail and into the wilds; by January, Ava is the only one left, and she is still lost. We know from the start that Ava is now dead because we meet her as a corpse, but even so, her journal entries leading up to her death create an inevitable feeling of sadness, of a pathos for these two young women whose lives will end because a man insisted he knew what he was doing. One night Savannah wakes up in the woods behind the house with no memory of having sleepwalked out there, and finds a dead woman propped up against a tree. After her initial shock, Savannah goes through the bag next to the corpse, finding a journal that tells her who the woman is and what happened to her.  Sara Van Os’ debut novel Decomposition Book is named for the journal Savannah finds, which is the second of the two parallel narratives that form this story. The journal contains Ava’s story in her own words, written towards the end of her life and recounting the camping trip that turns into a nightmare. Savannah, with intrusive thoughts that take the shape of her ex-best friend Michelle who goads her on, chooses not to report the corpse right away and instead read the journal first. In doing that, she begins to know who Ava was, and starts to see the corpse as a friend. She visits her daily, and sits with her as she reads her story. She goes back home and looks Ava up online, finds out that she was an opera singer, sees what she looked like when she was alive, and builds her a personality based on her digital footprint and her journal entries. It would all sound creepy, if it wasn’t so painfully clear just how lonely and miserable and in need of loving intimacy Savannah is.  Not just has Savannah had a traumatic experience (we do find out what it was, at the end), but she is trying very hard to cope with an unmedicated disorder. Her OCD isn’t the kind where she feels the compulsion to clean, though she wishes she had that instead of the constant intrusive thoughts. It is jarring to read someone else’s compulsive thoughts this way, especially for neurodiverse readers: the cruelty we subject ourselves too, the terrible ways we talk to ourselves, the ways our brains trick us into spiralling down to the unhealthy depths are all made so painfully clear via Savannah’s narrative. It can be heartbreaking to read as this young woman tears herself down in fear and loneliness, as she repeats terrible things her (awful) best friend had told her that she has absorbed as truth about herself. Savannah convinces herself she has no empathy, but that “it can’t be [her] fault. It’s a generational problem. Corpses have been walking in and out of my life as long as I can remember: 9/11 as a baby, true crime docs always on the TV, the news, live streamed wars, that Reddit video of a cartel beheading that went around my middle school, Twitter… One time the high school next to mine got shot up and I just went back to school the next day like nothing had happened,” but with Ava, Savannah starts to feel something, because Ava is “not just a story; she was a life. I have her voice. I have her handwriting. I have her body. I have something real, for once, in a world where everything unpleasant can just be scrolled past.”  Buy the Book Decomposition Book Sara van Os Buy Book Decomposition Book Sara van Os Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget So much of Savannah’s OCD has to do with chasing certainty, and in Ava (or rather in Ava’s dead body) she finds that. Here is a person who won’t find her too much, won’t think as Michelle did, that Savannah is “always spilling out over [her] own edges.” Here is a person who is slowly, systematically wasting away physically, but also coming together in Savannah’s mind, as she reads more and more of Ava’s journal entries. The slow decomposition of Ava’s body parallels the slow unravelling of Savannah’s mind, as she tries to figure herself out and as her intrusive thoughts take on a desperate shape. What is real, and what isn’t almost doesn’t matter, because what we see is a young girl so scared and alone that she needs the ghost of a stranger to guide her to her true self. Ava, the more experienced and confident gay woman who was firmly rooted in her identity, turns out to be Savannah’s catalyst, in more ways than one. As much as one version of Ava takes on life and gives a new life to Savannah, her body continues to rot, until she becomes “Las Vegas for maggots… feasting at the all-you-can-eat buffet that is her corpse… a blanket so thick that I can barely see her underneath.” What really stands out in Decomposition Book is Savannah’s loneliness: the sheer loneliness of coping with a mental illness, of trying to figure out sexual identity, of trying to heal from trauma, as well as from being physically alone, because it still feels safer than to be around people. Her dark humour and rapid spiralling all signal deep grief and fear, so well played out against Ava’s narrative, which shows her being steadfast and secure even when trying to survive physical dangers.  The one part where some suspension of disbelief is required is that three adults with existing family, friends and colleagues are lost in the woods for many months with apparently no one being able to find them, or any trace of them. Surely someone must have known where they were going? Surely someone would have found them or some trace of them or their phones? Sniffer dogs? Helicopters? Nothing? Even given the sheer size of the Adirondacks, this feels a little unlikely, but it isn’t a huge misstep in the novel, which turns out to be horrific in unexpected, emotional ways.  We are in Savannah’s head as much as she (and we) are in Ava’s. Both narratives are close first person, and because they are both loaded with so much grief and trauma and yes, also love, there is a deeply intimate feel to Decomposition Book. This is in turns a body horror thriller, a coming out and coming of age novel filled with queer longing, an examination of a debilitating invisible mental illness, and a young woman’s attempt at moving on from a trauma that she does not want to let define her. Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out who you really are, and sometimes it’s the ghosts of the people we wish we’d been who help us find ourselves.[end-mark] Decomposition Book is published by Hanover Square Press.Read an excerpt. The post Death Becomes Her: <i>Decomposition Book</i> by Sara Van Os appeared first on Reactor.