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

THE LAST KINGDOM, Season 5

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THE LAST KINGDOM, one of my favorite Netflix series, recently came to a conclusion with its fifth season, which brought it up to book 10 of Bernard Cornwell’s 13-tome series. While I enjoyed the season and it wrapped everything up, it was the weakest season for me.

In this season, Brida exacts her revenge on the Saxons and specifically Uhtred, toppling the Northumbrian kingdom in the process. Uhtred must ride to his daughter’s defense, while King Edward makes moves to realize his father’s vision of a united England. Edward’s father in law, Aethelhelm, continues his conniving to ensure his grandson gains the throne, which culminates in a final battle that includes Bebbanburg as the prize.

As always, Alexander Dreymon brings the beloved character of Uhtred to life. The season starts off really strong, with some terrific establishing scenes in Iceland and with Uhtred raising Athelstan. The later battle scenes are bloodily well done, and all the major plot lines are resolved more or less satisfactorily. The season felt weak for me, however. I had the same feeling watching the last season of THE EXPANSE, my favorite sci-fi show, and definitely while watching the last season of GAME OF THRONES. It’s like once a show is canceled and must be brought to a finish, the creators phone in the expected, lay on what they think is fan service, and offer up something that feels watered down, shortcutted, and plodding to the next scene or plot point. From Uhtred failing in most of what he tries to do to his daughter oddly rejecting him to Athelhelm acting like a comic book villain to characters teleporting to Brida somehow deserving redemption despite her utter cruelty, and more, the whole thing felt off and seeking the exit.

I still liked it, just the way I did the last season of THE EXPANSE. The writers didn’t betray their own show the way GAME OF THRONES’ creators notoriously did. I just didn’t love it, and by the the time the spell broke for me early in the season, I was simply watching to finish.

Fans of the Cornwell series will notice that there are still three books left that haven’t been adapted. Good news! In late 2021, Netflix announced a two-hour movie, SEVEN KINGS JUST DIE, will be released in late 2022 or early to mid 2023. This film will serve as an epilogue for the show. I’m looking forward to it.

DAISY JONES AND THE SIX by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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With its arresting cover, DAISY JONES AND THE SIX grabbed my attention several times at the bookstore, only to be left on the shelf. Then I grabbed it again, read a few pages, and ended up pretty hooked. This is a terrific story about music, the music industry, and the risks of putting yourself on the line for your art. I loved it.

The novel is epistolary, consisting of interview transcripts from a series of interviews woven together into a group narrative about a fictional rock band. The result is an oral history of a famous band in the 1970s, Daisy Jones and the Six.

At the start, we’re introduced to Daisy, a young, beautiful, and talented woman growing up in California and dreaming of putting her stamp on the world as a singer. In a parallel story, we’re introduced to Billy Dunne and his band the Six, serious musicians working hard to claw their way into the public ear. When the Six start to get big, they end up hooking up with Daisy to make a new album, and the personal and creative sparks fly until they ignite.

In a lot of ways, this is a familiar story: rock band rises and falls due to a combination of drugs, personal conflict, and hubris. Jenkins, however, makes it fresh with her own stamp on it. The epistolary format put off some readers, and it’s true all the people in the story have a similar voice and that you can only go so deep into character with such an approach. For me, the biggest negative happened fairly early, when Daisy was portrayed in glowing accounts as somebody admirable and wonderful, though honestly she comes across as a spoiled kid used to getting her way because she’s unnaturally good looking and has rich parents.

What kept me going initially was the Six and their story. Jenkins did some hardcore homework to capture a story about a hardworking band on the rise that really captures the era and otherwise rings true. An interesting choice was to get the crash and burn due to drugs out of the way early and then make recovery and staying sober a key part of the story and its tension. Meanwhile, Daisy soon came around for me as a terrific character, as she matures and learns she has to work hard to earn her place, while maintaining her uncompromising toughness and vision.

Overall, I loved DAISY JONES AND THE SIX. I found it believable to the point of authentic, immersive, and a hell of a fun story about a band and the people who make up that band in one of the best periods for rock music.

BLACK CRAB (2022)

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Based on the novel by Jerker Virdborg, Swedish film BLACK CRAB offers a dark apocalyptic vision I really wanted to like but found fairly flawed. Carried by stimulating set pieces and solidly empathetic acting by Noomi Rapace (LAMB), it’s engaging but in the end left me feeling pretty empty.

It’s the near future, and Sweden is devouring itself in a conflict that appears to be a civil war. Caroline Edh (Rapace), a soldier in this war-torn, apocalyptic wasteland, seemingly exists to fight, inflicting vengeance on the enemy who took her teenage daughter from her early in the conflict when Edh was just a civilian trying to flee the city. She’s called before a commander who tells her they’re losing the war, and she and a small team must travel behind enemy lines to deliver a canister to a research facility on an island. This canister, she’s told, could end the war. As the sea here is frozen over, they will travel across the archipelago on ice skates. It looks like a suicide mission, but Edh accepts, as she’s told her daughter is alive and well on the island.

There’s a lot going for BLACK CRAB. First off, it’s unrelentingly grim, providing a very dark backdrop against which Edh’s tiny bit of hope to reunite with her daughter burns brightly. This is an apocalyptic world, no goofing around or comic relief to break the tension, nothing happy about it all, in fact. The world building is exceptional, with the journey punctuated by sharp, economical, and realistic action scenes and provocative set pieces. As with the striking Swedish invasion movie UNTHINKABLE, the conflict and the enemy are left vague, and it’s unclear who the good guys are. The canister starts off as a MacGuffin but when it’s revealed what it is, it changes the game. The plot is simple: get from point A to B to end a horrific war. The theme of, in a war like this, the only side worth fighting for is humanity’s, is powerful.

On the downside, for me as a viewer, there are some flaws. The vagueness of the conflict worked as a mystery in UNTHINKABLE but feels generic in BLACK CRAB, making the whole thing seem kind of meaningless. Some of the major plot points feel very derivative. The protagonist chooses to side with humanity seemingly out of vengeance rather than as a purely moral decision. This compromises the protagonist’s decision that changes everything in the last act and only adds to the bleakness rather than rising above and sharply contrasting against it.

Then there’s the timing. The film came out while people watched very real horrors unfolding in Ukraine, so I’m not sure the release’s timing helped or hindered it.

Overall, BLACK CRAB was watchable for me, particularly for its remarkable world building, set pieces, and Noomi Rapace bringing much-needed humanity to her character, but the overall bleak and empty story and lack of a true moral decision kept it from being great for me.

CRACOW MONSTERS

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In the Polish series CRACOW MONSTERS, a medical student joins a group of supernaturally gifted students working with a mysterious professor to investigate demonology. A work of dark urban fantasy with strong roots in Polish mythology, the series follows genre conventions while serving up something that feels unconventional, gritty, and lived in. I liked this one a lot, it’s a lot of fun.

In the first episode, we meet Alex, starting her first year at medical school in the city of Cracow. The sole survivor of several tragedies, haunted by the death of her mother and horrific night terrors, she worries she will go insane like her mother and distracts herself with partying and sex. (Ah, to be young again, when you can party hard all night and then go to class the next morning with a giant cup of coffee feeling a little worse for wear but ready to go.) When she’s invited by a brilliant professor to an internship with his group of gifted students, she enters a world where Polish mythology is real. And she learns she is at the center of it.

There’s a lot to like here. Cracow is wonderfully gritty, its locations offering a distinctly European mix of hip and modern with old and even ancient. The characters are basically angsty hipsters, but they’re believable, and they’re interesting as a team. The monsters are terrific–a pair of twins who are succubi, a monstrous version of Krampus/Santa Claus, and so on–all controlled by a malevolent spirit who may not be a demon but instead a god. The plot rolls out as a simple dark urban fantasy but with just enough complexity that it comes together. The Polish lore is great.

All’s not perfect, as it rarely is. The pacing may be a little slow for some, at least in the early episodes (I personally didn’t mind the slow build). Alex is difficult nearly to the point of being unlikable, though that’s a common reaction for me watching something with a strong dash of YA in it. Her battles with various monsters roll out without much tension, they seem to resolve easily and in a scripted manner. And as is common with TV shows where the writers want to keep a sense of mystery going, characters argue, avoid talking, or “cease to exist” due to a cutaway when a simple conversation would fix things. Also common, the arch villain talks about how he’s going to kill the protagonist instead of easily doing it. A number of smaller plot questions were punted to Season 2.

But no matter. Though the Neil Gaiman style of urban fantasy isn’t my usual thing, I liked this one a lot, and there’s plenty on the table for a second season if it earns it. Recommended if you’re looking for fresh, offbeat, and highly immersive dark fantasy.

QUO VADIS, AIDA?

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In QUO VADIS, AIDA?, a 2020 Bosnian film written, produced, and directed by Jasmila Žbanic, we see the horrific Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War through the eyes of a woman struggling to protect her family from what she believes will be certain death. This powerful, realistic, and heartbreaking film is still haunting me.

During the Bosnian War in the Nineties, Serbian military and paramilitary forces (led by Ratko Mladic, who was later convicted for war crimes) lay siege to the city of Srebrenica, declared a United Nations safe zone. We see Aida, a schoolteacher, working as a translator between the city leaders and the Dutch officers serving with the UN, who promise to use force to protect the citizens. In the next scene, we see the population fleeing to crowd the local UN base as the Serbs enter the city. But the Serbs aren’t done. The film shows us what happens over the next 24 hours.

Translating from Latin as “Where are you going, Aida?”, QUO VADIS, AIDA? presents a portrait of a woman with some agency (she works as a translator for the UN and therefore has their protection) who struggles to help her city or family. Over the next 24 hours, we see the UN come up as absolutely useless as the Dutch soldiers understand they are not allowed to back up their threats, resulting in their utter humiliation. (It’s easy to say the UN is “useless” in conflicts like the Bosnian War and the war against Ukraine, but it’s an instrument, not a government, and only as useless as its member countries want it do be.) We see the Serbs bully and murder the Bosnians and ultimately convince them to go willingly to their doom. And we see Aida go from trying to protect her city to desperately trying to protect her family as things quickly devolve to every person for themselves.

The film making style is almost perfect. No heart wrenching music, the matter of fact presentation without an ounce of bias. The story is presented almost in a documentary manner, respecting the viewer to supply the requisite emotions. Aida is not a hero but instead a wife and mother desperately trying to keep her men alive. The story becomes steadily more painful to experience, as you can see what’s coming but like Aida know there’s no way to prevent it, right to the end, when the survivors on both sides must not only live together again but also with what happened to them and what they’ve done.

I find stories about the Bosnian War particularly relevant because for anytime I hear somebody in America threatening civil war, this is exactly what they’re promising. Even now, its lessons aren’t even learned in Bosnia–the film could not be shot in Srebrenica itself because the current mayor is a genocide-denier.

THE CHILDREN RED PEAK On Sale for $2.99 Through March 31

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The Children of Red Peak is a Kindle Monthly Deal throughout March 31, 2022! It’s priced at just $2.99.

David Young, Deacon Price, and Beth Harris live with a dark secret. As children, they survived a religious group’s horrific last days at the isolated mountain Red Peak. Years later, the trauma of what they experienced never feels far behind.

When a fellow survivor commits suicide, they finally reunite and share their stories. Long-repressed memories surface, defying understanding and belief. Why did their families go down such a dark road? What really happened on that final night?

The answers lie buried at Red Peak. But truth has a price, and escaping a second time may demand the ultimate sacrifice.

“A heart-wrenching, thought-provoking, terrifying tale about the meaning of life . . . A great choice for fans of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians (2020), Paul Tremblay’s Disappearance at Devil’s Rock (2016), or Alma Katsu’s The Hunger (2018).” – Booklist

Get it here.