Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

THE DARK Season 2

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I enjoyed season 1 of THE DARK and looked forward to the second season of this German science fiction thriller series watchable on Netflix. Where the first season sets up all sorts of spooky plot questions based around a time travel portal in the woods near a small town, the second season answers much of the mystery while going for broke on the premise. The result is engaging and fun, though it comes close to flirting with the ridiculous extremes of LOST and feeling at times like a sci-fi soap opera.

The second season picks up where the first left off, with various characters trying to understand the connection between disappearances in the town now and 33 years earlier, or becoming time travelers themselves and players in a contest between two warring sides. One side wants to end the cycle of time loops that culminate in the apocalypse, the other wants the apocalypse to occur but save a certain portion of humanity. I think that’s the case, it’s actually not clear, nor is it entirely clear who the good and bad guys are.

The show is a real workout for the brain. Because the time travel occurs in 33-year jumps, the story plays out in 1920-21, 1953-54, 1986-87, 2019-20, and 2052-53, after the end of the world. As a result, you see characters at different times in their life–as children, adults, and seniors. There are numerous characters and family relationships to track. Then you have the mystery of the time travel itself, how it works and its influence on events.

A great deal of the fun of the show is in the bootstrap paradox. This is where time travel reverses cause and effect such that events seem to create themselves with no discernible origin. For example, suppose you’re about to die, but future-you comes back and saves you in the nick of time. The paradox is that in linear time, you should have died, so future-you would not exist to save you. ARRIVAL plays with the same idea. The concept is milked to full effect in THE DARK, which I found as frustrating as fun if not more so, as it eliminates cause and effect, and the show starts to rely on constant emotionally heavy, paradox-based reveals until every character is heavily involved in the time travel and the plot starts to become meaningless while producing yet another paradox. Time travel changes everything, but everything must happen as it always has in the loop.

In the end, THE DARK is a fun ride. The characters are likeable, the science fiction aspect and its mystery are compelling, and the writers tease out a good combination of mystery and reveal.

WE EAT OUR OWN by Kea Wilson

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Kea Wilson’s WE EAT OUR OWN is one hell of a debut–vividly written, ambitiously put together, and derived from the actual filming of the classic horror film CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST in a South American jungle. While the subplots didn’t weave together in such a way around the “blurred boundary between real violence and fiction/acting” theme to pay off at the conclusion, these parts and their sum are distinctive and engaging.

As for the synopsis, it’s titillating. In the 1970s, a nameless, struggling actor gets a call to go to Colombia to film a horror movie in the middle of the jungle for which there isn’t a script and the director is angrily searching to break boundaries to make something new. Inspired by domestic terrorism in his native Italy (the Red Brigades), the director is tired of carefully staged horror and wants to create the conditions for real violence, something that convinces viewers what they’re seeing is real and thereby affect them in a more visceral way by rejecting formula. Horror that shocks instead of feels safe. Intertwined with the main plot is a cast of characters at various levels of the production’s periphery–the other actors, a local drug cartel, guerillas, and people who live in the nearby town. Framing these stories is a transcript of a trial in which the director is accused of murder and negligence on his set.

The book is inspired by actual events surrounding the filming of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, a shock horror film that broke boundaries with its graphic and realistic violence toward people and animals, and which pioneered the found footage horror genre. As in the book, the film’s director was put on trial in Italy for making a snuff film. The film was banned in multiple countries.

For a debut, WE EAT OUR OWN is an impressive read. Character and setting are vividly rendered. Stylistically, the book stands out for its unorthodox choices of presenting the protagonist in second person, no quotation marks, and other choices. Wilson handles these devices deftly so they sing instead of distract. Her voice is confident.

My only criticism is I was very satisfied with the eating but not so much the aftertaste. For much of the book, the subplots and minor characters are more detailed and engaging than the protagonist’s story, and while these side stories provide depth, they do little to move the main plot forward, which dissipates rather than concludes.

Overall, I enjoyed this debut and look forward to more from Wilson.

CHERNOBYL (2019)

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The HBO series CHERNOBYL (2019) is without a doubt one of the most gripping and powerful dramas I’ve ever watched on TV. Intelligent, poignant, and horrific, this miniseries provides a fictionalized dramatization of an actual nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, which came close to devastating an entire continent.

The show gets very quickly to the accident, which is horrifying itself because we, the viewers, know how dangerous radiation is and that there was a catastrophic explosion exposing the core to open air, while some of the characters don’t, either through ignorance or willfully ignoring the truth. The show frequently revisits this horror as we learn of the incompetence, lies, and brutality of the system that contributed to the accident while covering it up, and as various characters learn they have very little time left before they die a painful death.

As news of the disaster works its way up the Soviet bureaucracy, Valery Legasov (the fantastic Jared Harris giving the usual master class on acting), a nuclear scientist, is brought in to help Boris Scherbina (the always solid Stellan Skarsgård), a bureaucrat tasked with fixing the mess while safeguarding the interests of the State. At first, they hate each other, but a respect forms as Boris comes to understand the severity of the situation and that nothing else matters other than solving it.

The problem is eventually solved for the most part, but it’s only through the heroism of thousands of workers, soldiers, and scientists who flock to Chernobyl to help. These are truly shining moments among the horror and bureaucratic stupidity, where average people sacrifice themselves and/or tell the State to go to hell. Either because what needs doing is too important, or because they’ve been exposed to radiation and know they’re already dead. The show ends on this odd and poignant juxtaposition between disgust with human stupidity and hope in human heroism and compassion, combined with condemnation of the lies that go hand in hand with national exceptionalism.

Overall, CHERNOBYL is powerful, gripping, smart, interesting–a brilliant example of TV done right.

My New Deal with Orbit

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On August 20, 2019, Orbit will publish my political thriller, OUR WAR, about a journalist and UN worker who uncover the use of child soldiers during a second American civil war. Today, I’m very excited to announce Orbit will also publish my new psychological thriller with horror elements, tentatively titled THE SACRIFICE, in 2020.

In this novel, three people who survived their childhood in an apocalyptic cult reunite to confront their past and the entity that appeared the night the cult destroyed itself. THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and IT meet the Jonestown massacre in this psychological thriller about memory, trauma, belonging, and faith.

Publishing about 60 titles each year, Orbit U.S. is the sci-fi/fantasy imprint at Hachette Book Group U.S.A., with authors including M.R. Carey, Joe Abercrombie and Iain M. Banks. Plans for THE SACRIFICE are still preliminary, but the intent right now is to publish it likely in the fall of 2020.

Very exciting for me, it still feels like a dream. I’m very fortunate to be able to work with a quality company like Orbit.

BLACK MIRROR Season 5

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Like previous seasons, season 5 of BLACK MIRROR continues to focus on the collision of human nature and technology, revealing how technology changes us less than makes more of what we already are. It augments and enables emotion, instinct, and failings rather than corrects them. Unfortunately, this season takes a far lighter approach to the typically dark material, resulting in the show losing most of its punch. It went from brilliant episodes like “Metalhead” and “Hated in The Nation,” which would make me think and haunt me for days, to easily forgettable fare.

Season 5 consisted of three episodes. In one, two friends find a strange kind of love that exists only online. In another, a man expresses the horror of how addictive social media can lead to death. In the last, technology turns a troubled singer into a product. The episodes are fun, interesting, and engaging, but compared to previous seasons, they feel hollowed out and pandering to a stereotyped American audience. Not as bad as GoT did with its disastrously weak final season, but yeah.

So I’m still a fan and I liked the new season, I just didn’t love it and hope it returns to its dark and disturbing roots.

THE TERROR (2018)

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Based on the novel by Dan Simmons, THE TERROR, which originally aired on AMC and I caught on Amazon Prime, offers a horror take on Captain Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic in 1845–1848. Driven by strong characters and a powerful cast, the show brilliantly combines a supernatural monster element with actual historical events rendered with rich accuracy and realism.

The show begins with two British warships, which have been converted into the most technologically advanced exploring vessels of the age. Their mission is to explore the Arctic in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, which would offer a dramatically shorter trade route between the United Kingdom and China. Leading the expedition are Captain Crozier of the TERROR (Jared Harris, rapidly becoming one of my favorite actors), Captain Franklin (the great Ciaran Hinds) of the EREBUS, and Franklin’s second, Commander Fitzjames (the solid Tobias Menzies). We also get to know many other crew members, all of them distinct and likeable or detestable.

Franklin is out for glory and rashly commits the ships to a route that freezes up and leaves the ships icebound, against the advice of Crozier, who is the more practical of the two but also haunted by his failings to the point of struggling with a drinking problem. Things are bad enough as the crew is forced to winter in the Arctic, but after a local native is killed, a strange creature appears and begins hunting them one by one.

The real horror element isn’t the creature, however, but the cold, the refusal of the ice to thaw, the deteriorating rations, and the resulting madness and starvation that slowly tears the crew apart and turns them from honor- and duty-bound Englishmen into savages. Fear in all its guises is on full display in this show, as the men continually face an impossible and steadily worsening situation and struggle to maintain duty and compassion. The result is powerful, heartbreaking drama.

In short, the show is brilliant. While it decisively concluded as a miniseries, based on its popularity, its makers are turning it into an anthology show, with the second season set in a Japanese internment camp during WW2. I highly recommend it.