Books reading recommendations Seven Strange, Secret SFF Versions of History From time-travel hijinks to occult weirdness in Las Vegas to an alternate Space Race… By Sam Reader | Published on April 8, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share History is weird and fascinating. It’s a vast crisscrossing map of coincidences, strange incidents, crackpot theories, and violent disturbances that eventually coalesce into the circumstances affecting the present day. Even weirder is science fiction and fantasy’s relationship with history, where everything from meticulously researched what-ifs to absurd flights of fancy are welcome: There are time travelers desperate to keep history from folding in on itself, conspiracies battling throughout the actual history of the world as we know it, and riffs building on those bizarre coincidences and incidents. In celebration of all these myriad paths in time, here are seven strange and secret science fiction and fantasy histories. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis Oxford University has discovered time travel. In order to fund research in the wake of this monumental discovery, they must accept the patronage of a little old lady who wants nothing more than to restore Coventry Cathedral to the pristine condition it was in before World War II. This involves the overworked Ned Henry and Verity Kindle leaping back and forth to Victorian England to find a hideous vase central to the restoration while desperately trying to preserve history before they alter the timeline irrevocably. This kicks off a romantic door-slamming farce as the two desperately try to stay one step ahead of each paradox they cause, all while bonding over their shared love of literature (one of the sweetest running gags involves quotes from the Dorothy Sayers book Gaudy Night), art, and history. A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel A tense alternate history of the space program, What Comes Next is the story of a mother and daughter, the 98th and 99th generations of a family line known as the Kibsu, as they attempt to bring humanity to the stars before an uncertain and sinister doom engulfs Earth. This begins with Mia, the daughter, being sent into Germany during the end of World War II to retrieve Wernher von Braun for the Americans under Operation Paperclip, while her mother works behind the scenes in various intelligence agencies to manipulate both the US and Russian space programs. Neuvel’s approach to the story is refreshing in its far-from-rose-tinted view of the Space Race, beginning with bluntly discussing Operation Paperclip and depicting von Braun as a smug, vainglorious Nazi; his characters’ internal dialogues frame what they do as morally fraught but grimly necessary in their quest to reach the stars. Last Call by Tim Powers The strongest and weirdest of Powers’ secret histories is an epic noir in which chaos mages descend on poker tournaments, Bugsy Siegel builds the Flamingo Hotel as an occult temple so he can install himself as the Fisher King, a body-swapping crime lord rules Southern California and Nevada, and games of chance are a method of divine communion. Into this maelstrom steps Scott Crane, a man who won a weird poker game only to walk away with part of himself missing. Drawn back to Las Vegas and the strange houseboat on Lake Mead, Scott and his allies are drawn into a bizarre ritual as Powers blends the history of Las Vegas, occult mythology, true crime, and epic fantasy into an epic about losing and winning it all in a city that thrives on constant reversals of fortune. The Beheading Game by Rebecca Lehmann Lehmann’s historical picaresque begins, rather strangely, with its headless heroine waking up in a chest, her linen-wrapped head in her hands. From there, she escapes, sews her head back on, and finds herself in the streets of Southwark. Such a place is dangerous enough for a woman without any place in the world (especially one who was recently beheaded), but Anne resolves to exact revenge on her former husband and his current paramour in an effort to keep her daughter Elizabeth in line for the throne. Lehmann might dispense quickly with the absurd premise (Anne’s head is back on her shoulders and attached roughly two chapters in), but the true joy of the story is watching Anne use her second chance at life to grow from an out-of-touch ingenue (one who tells a public torture victim “I’ll pray for you”) into a savvy woman of the world in a way her real-life counterpart never got the chance to. Backmask by OF Cieri Backmask might be about the weird intersection of pop and rock music and the occult in 1960s America, but Cieri’s paranoid psychedelic horror novel knows there’s a lot more than music going on behind the making of pop records. Backmask descends into that underground, the reader following Valerie Chill as she meets with dangerous cult leaders and tries to keep her weapon-toting record producer boss in check. Hush, Chill’s blade-wielding boss, has an idea to meld occult practice and rock music to recreate the sound of his prophetic dreams. As with every attempt to dabble in secret knowledge, this gets the attention of competing occultists and record producers as Hush’s project becomes the focus of a secret war fought through popular music. Despite the far-out premise, Cieri’s well-researched attention to the period means that this somehow feels like a book where the names have been changed to protect the (extremely) guilty. Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America by Damien Lincoln Ober Ober’s satire of the Founding Fathers begins by listing the actual deaths of Benjamin Franklin and his compatriots, providing a framework for the increasingly bizarre story within. That story is a wi-fi enabled retelling of the founding myths of America, one featuring a net-speak Declaration of Independence, Button Gwinnett fighting flame wars with his longtime rival before they duel in Georgia, and social media campaigns to ratify the Articles of Confederation. While the story is pure science fiction—eventually the fledgling United States finds themselves fighting against sinister hiveminds and brain-infecting viruses—the relationships and events hew closer to historical record than one would expect, creating a wild and incredibly sharp satire of political engagement both past and present. Everfair by Nisi Shawl Another multi-viewpoint work about the fictionalized founding of a nation, Everfair is the vast and dense history of the nation of Everfair, a Congo wrested free from the control and atrocities of Belgium and opened as a haven both to the rightful residents and freed slaves. Upon this foundation, Shawl builds a vast interlocking series of narratives about building a free state, and using the wondrous postindustrial technology usually present in steampunk works to create a budding utopia. Where most works would concentrate on the utopia part and gloss over the wrenching labor pains involved in the birth of a nation, Shawl’s approach is more nuanced and expansive, showing the political, ideological, and religious clashes as well as the hardship both before and after the eventual founding of Everfair. It’s a utopia that feels like a true place, with all the turbulent history that entails.[end-mark] The post Seven Strange, Secret SFF Versions of History appeared first on Reactor.

News Dark Matter Dark Matter Season 2 Gets Release Date and a Plot Synopsis That Takes Us Beyond Blake Crouch’s Book Crouch also serves as writer and showrunner of the Apple TV series By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on April 7, 2026 Image: Apple TV Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Apple TV Apple TV’s adaptation of Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter is finally coming back for a second season this summer, and we’ve also gotten a tease of what potential future seasons of the show may entail. The first season starred Joel Edgerton as Jason Dessen, a man with a loving wife and son who gets abducted by a Jason from an alternate universe who invented universe hopping because he regrets not marrying Jason’s wife first. That season saw Jason trying to find his way back to his wife and his universe (the other Jason shunted him into the “black box” that allows for universe jumping). Here’s the official synopsis for what we’ll see in the upcoming episodes: Season two picks up with the Dessens as they settle into a quiet life in a world that finally seems safe until the unimaginable forces them to run once again. As Jason’s obsession with the Box deepens, Daniela’s (Jennifer Connelly) growing paranoia pushes her to the brink, threatening to tear their fragile stability apart. Elsewhere, Amanda (Alice Braga) and Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) join forces in a desperate attempt to find their way home. With Blair (Amanda Brugel) determined to stop him, Leighton (Dayo Okeniyi) relentlessly chases his grand vision of creating a perfect world. For those who have read Crouch’s book, that synopsis suggests that we will go beyond the events of the novel. Crouch, however, remains deeply involved with the show, serving as creator, executive producer, writer, and showrunner. All episodes, in fact, are co-written by him and Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry. The second season of Dark Matter premieres on Apple TV on Friday, August 28, 2026, followed by one new episode every Friday through October 30, 2026. We also got some first look photos today, which you can see above and below. [end-mark] Image: Apple TV Image: Apple TV Image: Apple TV Image: Apple TV The post <i>Dark Matter</i> Season 2 Gets Release Date and a Plot Synopsis That Takes Us Beyond Blake Crouch’s Book appeared first on Reactor.

News Buffet Infinity The Buffet Infinity Trailer Defies Explanation You’ll never look at retro low-budget commercials and/or buffets the same way again By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on April 7, 2026 Screenshot: Yellow Veil Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Yellow Veil Pictures The critically acclaimed, certifiably weird comedy-horror film Buffet Infinity is coming for us, and there’s a new trailer for the film that is frankly worth watching without knowing anything about the movie. I suggest going to the bottom of this post and watching it now, though I’ll continue to write words if you’d prefer a written description instead. Buffet Infinity comes from writer-director Simon Glassman and is made up of television ads, some real, some fake, that tell a story about… well, I’ll just let the official synopsis do the heavy lifting here: Echoing the Canadian comedy classic SCTV and picking from hundreds of hours of original, low-budget TV ads to tell the sinister tale of two restaurants battling it out in the fictional town of Westridge County. Ads for insurance, used car rivals, a local religious scholar, and a recording artist converge to tell the story of an expanding sinkhole, a cult, and an ever-growing restaurant that becomes unsettlingly sentient. Sentient restaurants? Sinkholes? How did this film come to be? “The concept of a film told through advertisements has been with me since the mid-’90s,” Glassman told Variety when the film was picked up by Yellow Veil Pictures for distribution back in July. “At the time, The Simpsons were promoting a crossover episode with The X-Files where agents Mulder and Scully would be making cameos, and it was such a big deal that the network began referencing the episode inside other advertisements. Maybe it was just the Butterfinger commercial? Honestly, I can’t really recall… but I remember really liking that it was a strange, fully immersive experience.” Glassman added that he wanted to “tell a story of a brand as a sentient intelligence and invasive presence… how it grows, struggles, transforms, and sometimes attacks.” The film stars Kevin Singh, Claire Theobald, and Donovan Workun. It’s set to premiere in theaters on April 28, 2026, and on digital starting May 8, 2026. Check out the bonkers trailer below. [end-mark] The post The <i>Buffet Infinity</i> Trailer Defies Explanation appeared first on Reactor.

News X-Men The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s X-Men Movie Officially Has Writers Director Jake Schreier shared that alums from Beef and The Bear will pen the script By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on April 7, 2026 Screenshot: Disney+ Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Disney+ It’s been almost eight years since Disney acquired 20th Century Fox, which means that fans have been waiting almost eight years to see the X-Men in their own Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. In that time, we’ve seen the X-Men in the delightful animated series, X-Men ’97 (pictured above), and Kelsey Grammer, Patrick Stewart, and others reprised versions of their X-Men roles in The Marvels and Multiverse of Madness (and also, it seems, the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday). But a standalone film (well, as standalone as an MCU movie can be these days) has proven elusive. Last July, however, we found out that Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier would be directing an X-Men movie for the MCU. We also heard in 2024 that Michael Lesslie was in talks to write a script, but today we got official news that two other writers are on board to pen the film, which is reportedly set to come out on May 5, 2028, although Marvel hasn’t officially announced its release date. In an interview with Collider to promote the second season of the Netflix series, Beef, Schreier shared that the X-Men movie he’s working on has two writers on board: Beef creator Lee Sung Jin and The Bear co-showrunner, Joanna Calo. The two also worked on the Thunderbolts* script with Schreier, meaning they’re all familiar with what it takes to make an MCU movie. In addition, Beef and The Bear have received critical and commercial acclaim for their character-based storylines, which is something Schreier suggested will help in drafting the X-Men script. “When you go back and read X-Men [comics], there’s ideology but also interpersonal drama, almost of a soap opera quality,” Schreier told Collider. “Having writers who understand both how to drive ideology from personal stakes, if we get that right, that’s what will feel most honest to what X-Men can be.” However, details on the plot of that script, or even which X-Men we’ll see on screen, remain tightly under wraps, as does pretty much everything else about the film. Having writers attached, however, at least means that the project is still ongoing, giving fans hope that the rumored 2028 premiere date will hold true. [end-mark] The post The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s X-Men Movie Officially Has Writers appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts gothic horror Read an Excerpt From Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker Two people living centuries apart discover a door between their worlds. By Kylie Lee Baker | Published on April 7, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker, a new horror novel interwoven with Japanese mythology, out from Hanover Square Press on April 14th. October, 2026: Lee Turner doesn’t remember how or why he killed his college roommate. The details are blurred and bloody. All he knows is he has to flee New York and go to the one place that might offer refuge—his father’s new home in Japan, a house hidden by sword ferns and wild ginger. But something is terribly wrong with the house: no animals will come near it, the bedroom window isn’t always a window, and a woman with a sword appears in the yard when night falls. October, 1877: Sen is a young samurai in exile, hiding from the imperial soldiers in a house behind the sword ferns. A monster came home from war wearing her father’s face, but Sen would do anything to please him, even turn her sword on her own mother. She knows the soldiers will soon slaughter her whole family when she sees a terrible omen: a young foreign man who appears outside her window. One of these people is a ghost, and one of these stories is a lie. Something is hiding beneath the house of sword ferns, and Lee and Sen will soon wish they never unburied it. Chapter 4 Len Lee slept through the moment his mother disappeared, but he saw it in his dreams. First, she lay down on the hotel bed and grew thinner, flatter, until she was barely there at all. A faceless man came in and folded her up like a piece of laundry. The man put her in a suitcase, zipped it up, and dragged her away. Lee wondered, sometimes, if his mother disappeared because she fell into one of his dreams and couldn’t find her way out. He was twelve, on a trip to Cambodia with his parents during summer break. They were staying in a bungalow in the middle of a tropical garden, a place that was supposed to be perfect. Lee remembered bright fuchsia flowers, giant taro leaves, and guava that he could reach from the second-floor balcony. He remembered the haze of jet lag that made his body feel stuffed full of cotton instead of blood, how he’d been halfway between the real world and a dream when his mother opened the sliding door. That was the last mistake she ever made. Lee had cracked an eye open, watched his mother sitting in the open doorway, her feet on the sandy porch, staring out at the beach and the white sun and perfectly blue sky, so bright it had to be a lie. Her long brown hair blew behind her, and when she turned to look over her shoulder at Lee, the sun outlined her silhouette, and Lee couldn’t see her face. She was too bright. She was always too bright. “Go ahead and take a nap, Lee,” his mother said. “When you wake up, we’ll get dinner, okay?” Lee didn’t remember if he’d answered. He’d been thinking about the tire swing his mom had found at the edge of the forest, how his dad said not to push him too high in case he fell off, but his mom pushed him higher and higher and Lee thought if he just reached out, he would touch the sun. When he opened his eyes again, it was dark, and the breeze blowing in from the open door had turned cold. Lee shivered, pulled the blankets higher, and sat up. The sand looked almost blue at night, like he had fallen asleep on a distant moon. “Mom?” he said. The words blew back at him in the breeze and died on the sandy carpet. Back then, Lee thought his parents would always come home. That was his naive truth, and he believed in his heart that no force in the world could stop it. So he turned on the lamp on the nightstand and read his book and wasn’t particularly worried, though he still kept the door open for his mom. The night grew deeper, and eventually Lee’s father came back from his scuba diving trip, which Lee had been too young to go on. It was the reason his mom had stayed back with him, the reason she’d been sitting in the doorway instead of in the ocean. And even when his father called his mom, and then the police, Lee hadn’t really understood what it meant. He stared at the open door, sure that at any moment she was going to walk back through it. He knew, objectively, that people died. But people didn’t just disappear. The police combed through the forests and then the water, convinced that she’d gone for a swim and drowned. But Lee’s mom had always told him never to swim alone, so he didn’t think she’d broken her own rule. And if she had, she wouldn’t have left the door open while Lee was sleeping. Lee noticed the tracks in the sand before the police, but he didn’t say anything because he didn’t know what they meant. Curved lines, like two snakes had slithered away side by side, toward the forest. Later, the policeman told his father that they were wheel tracks from a large suitcase. Lee remembered his dream, his mom folded up and put away like a packing cube. And that was another moment when the pieces of the world did not fit together—you couldn’t quietly cram a person into a suitcase. Surely Lee would have woken up. And why wouldn’t they have taken him too? Buy the Book Japanese Gothic Kylie Lee Baker Buy Book Japanese Gothic Kylie Lee Baker Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget He never considered the possibility of a human trafficking ring until his mother’s disappearance ended up on the news and the reporters started throwing theories around, like it was a guessing game and not his mother’s entire life. Lee researched human trafficking in Cambodia and found out the country was considered Tier 3, meaning the government knows there’s human trafficking and doesn’t care. Foreign men are forced into manual labor, and foreign women and children are sold as prostitutes. Someone must have knocked his mother out, crammed her into a suitcase, and taken her away. At least, that was what the police thought. They didn’t want to pronounce someone dead without a body or massive amounts of blood, and they had neither. Lee couldn’t sleep for a long time after he read that. Twelve-year-olds shouldn’t have to lie awake at night contemplating whether it was better if their mothers suffocated to death inside a suitcase or were still alive in a sex ring. Not long after, Lee’s mother started to visit his dreams. He saw her sitting in the doorway every night, her hair blowing in the breeze, her face made of pure sunlight. In his dreams, she never spoke. She only screamed. His mother’s mouth was an abyss, and in it he heard the ocean churning. Her scream widened, and the ocean poured black from her lips, but nothing could dampen the sound. After that, Lee couldn’t look at boxes anymore. Tissue boxes, packages, desk drawers, violin cases. Every time he saw one, he could imagine his mother being folded up and shoved inside. He could see the exact way her bones would have to snap, which parts of her would have to be hacked off in order to fit. It turned into a gruesome game of How to Fit a Human into Any Sized Space, one his brain forced him to play every day. After enough practice, he determined that someone his mother’s size could probably fit in her entirety into a carry-on suitcase if you cut her up and smashed some of the bigger bones, but she wouldn’t fit into anything smaller unless you started getting rid of body parts. Perhaps counterintuitively, Lee had started cramming himself into small spaces. The wide expanse of his bedroom suddenly felt too exposed, so he crawled underneath his bed and slept flat on his stomach. He wedged himself in the small space under the kitchen sink, alongside all the bleach and extra dish soap and Windex. Once, and only once, he climbed into a suitcase and did his best to zip it up all the way. There, with his knees pressed to his forehead, where it was hard to breathe, he felt like he’d entered a sacred space. Is this how you felt, Mom? The thought. He ran his hands across the smooth fabric of the interior and imagined the pieces of his mom crammed in here with him, her severed fingers lac-ing with his. His dad found him and told him never to do that again, then cried for a long time. Lee hated seeing his father cry, so he apologized and tried not to even look at another suitcase. But he knew, even then, that something strange had happened inside the suitcase, both to him and to his mother. As if the world had slit its belly and showed Lee its pulsing organs and now Lee could see the truth that no one else dared to look at. The end of his mother was the beginning of something bigger. He was sure of it, even then. […] Chapter 7 Sen […] When Sen was seven, her father put her in a box and left her to die. It was a wooden crate that a servant had used to carry sacks of rice to the house. Sen was just small enough to fit inside if she hugged her shins and pressed her face against her knees. Her father had led her outside at night, placed her in the box, and told her to make herself small. She thought it was a game, at first. She’d climbed inside, imagined she was one of the tiny snails that oozed across the river rocks, hugged her legs tight and held her breath and tried to be so small her father couldn’t see her at all, because that would make him happy. Then her father nailed the box shut. The hammer jolted the wood, so loud, so close to Sen’s ears. He placed her in a hole in the earth and piled wet dirt on top of her until she could no longer see the sky. The box was poorly built, so the slats didn’t line up perfectly and dirt spilled through the seams, worms and beetles wriggling across Sen’s bare toes. You will know what it’s like to be dead, her father said. Sen had never thought she was scared of the dark, but she had only ever known darkness as starry skies and dim bedrooms with her mother sleeping beside her. This dark was all-consuming, a lead weight pressed down all around her, the sound of growing roots and scurrying bugs and the ache in her neck that bloomed into a sharp pain. Chichiue won’t let me die, she thought. It’s a game, and he’ll come back for me. But time had a strange way of unfurling in the dark. It stretched long and thin like dough, the strands snapping as they grew too worn. Sen spent years in the dark doing nothing but breathing. Her stomach cramped with hunger, and her mouth went dry, and as another year passed, she began to real-ize that her father would not come back. He had always wanted sons—he’d said as much to her mother. Maybe he’d just gotten rid of Sen so he could start his family over again. He no longer needed her, just like he hadn’t needed Kura. The worms wriggled over her toes and the beetles crawled into her ears, but Sen couldn’t move a single inch to pull them out. The box grew smaller and smaller, crunching down on her bones from the weight of earth, and Sen imagined she was a rotting corpse melting back into the ground. And then, in the dark, came a thin voice. Satō? it whispered. Sugar. Sen remembered sugarcane in Kura’s tiny hands, her wet smile with fibers caught in her teeth. A small white hand parted the curtain of darkness and reached out for Sen. Sen couldn’t make out Kura’s face, but she could feel Kura’s stringy hair as it spilled across Sen’s bare legs, Kura’s jagged nails on her calves, Kura’s cold hand on Sen’s arm. “Kura,” Sen whispered into the darkness. “Chichiue has left me to die.” The hand tightened on her arm. Why would he do that? “Because I’m worthless,” Sen said, coughing as she breathed in wet dirt. “Because I’m weak.” The hand pinched down, fingers biting into Sen’s arm. He does this because you’re strong, Kura said. He does this to show you what you will become if you give in to your weakness. Then Kura set her hands on Sen’s knees and leaned closer, brushing the darkness aside like a silk curtain. Kura’s skin pulled taut and gray against her skull, wrinkled as worn leather hide. Her baby teeth hung loose from her gums, tethered by thin ligaments, jingling like wind chimes. Maggots crawled out of her ears and nose, their tiny fangs leaving scars on her face. And worst of all, her eyes had gone cloudy, like she was lost in a dense fog and would never find her way out. Satō, Kura said. Satō Satō Satō Satō. Sen could do nothing but hold tight to the pieces of herself and wait. After many years, her father returned and hauled the box back to the surface, removed the lid, and plucked her out. “Thank you, Chichiue,” Sen said as he set her on unsteady legs. “Thank you for showing me this.” “And what have I shown you?” her father said. Sen remembered Kura’s jingling teeth, wet globs of bloody drool that fell to her feet. “That life and death are one and the same,” Sen said. “That I exist because I am strong, and if I give in to fear, I will no longer exist.” Her father nodded, then turned and gestured for Sen to follow him. “Wipe your face,” he said. “We have work to do.” Sen quickly scrubbed her face with her muddy sleeves. It was the last time she ever cried. The Sen who had tasted death remained in the dirt among the worms, while the rest of Sen followed her father back to the house. From Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker. Copyright 2026 by Kylie Lee Baker. Published by Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HTP/HarperCollins. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Japanese Gothic</i> by Kylie Lee Baker appeared first on Reactor.