Reading/Watching Log #96

It’s been a busy month, filled with Christmas parades, Christmas ballets, Christmas markets and Christmas decorating (and it’s only just December now!) But I feel like I’m on top of it, especially concerning my Christmas shopping. Parents, sister and nephew are all accounted for regarding their gifts, and of course I bought my presents to myself ages ago (The Daughters of Ys illustrated by Jo Rioux and The Mabinogion illustrated by Alan Lee – yes!!)

Reading wise, there are more graphic novels, a very strange Babysitters Club book, and some Slavic fantasies (I’m finally getting to the end of that massive TBR pile). Watching wise, there was a more eclectic mix, including my sister’s favourite movie, some leftover werewolf films, the end of Disenchanted (and my Netflix subscription) and a return to season four of Doctor Who to catch up on Donna Noble’s history before getting to this year’s Christmas Specials.

I have also been sporadically watching episodes of the BBC’s Robin Hood with my friend, though I’m still working on a much longer review for the show as a whole, so there are no comments on it here.

Hansel and Gretel (Isaac Theatre Royal)

I had totally forgotten about the fact that I had tickets to this ballet, and in a way that was a good thing. I might not have been able to savour the anticipation, but I was able to walk in with no preconceptions whatsoever. And in hindsight, I’ve realized that most of the ballet I’ve seen is very traditional in its presentation. This was something completely different.

It’s the familiar fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel (two poor siblings get lost in the woods, stumble upon a gingerbread house in the woods, are given all the food they can gorge upon by a seemingly friendly woman, only to wake up and find themselves in the clutches of an evil witch) but with a very distinct aesthetic. You’re probably sick of me using that word, but it’s the only one that can cover the vibe of the production design, which I initially thought was reminiscent of A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Forget all the usual Brothers Grimm trappings (lederhosen, braids, aprons) and instead imagine a 1920s black-and-white noir: Gretel with a bob-cut, fairies as flappers with electric bulb tiaras/glittery bathing caps, the Sand Man as a Buster Keaton lookalike, and plenty of fox furs and turbans on the corps de ballet. Georges Méliès was a huge inspiration, particularly A Trip to the Moon, as at one point there is quite literally an appearance from the famous man-in-the-moon, though with an ice cream in his eye instead of a rocket ship.

There is a great love of old film here: the illusion of rain was created by projecting grainy film onto the backdrop, while the forests looked like they were made from forks revolving around one of those old-timey motion lamps. Remember the birds that eat the crumbs left behind as a trail? Here they’re reimagined as sweeper-women with long beaks and brooms that come out after dark to sweep the breadcrumbs away. The witch (initially played by a young woman) appears early on to lure away some children with giant ice creams, only for said children to appear later as mournful ghosts in the forest.

The gingerbread house is a lot of fun: much like the Tardis, it’s small on the outside (the siblings have to crawl in) and then huge on the inside, bursting with lights and colour. The witch’s gingerbread men servants appear, looking like something out of a candy-coloured horror film, with increasingly large platters piled up with food and treats. But then of course, the dream ends. The siblings wake up in the witch’s kitchen, with Hansel locked in a cage and Gretel forced to rescue him after the pretty young woman climbs into a cauldron and emerges as a green-skinned old witch with elongated fingers – and since this was the equivalent of a Christmas pantomime, of course the character was a man in drag.

Being a children’s ballet, there were a lot of kids in the audience, so I managed my expectations carefully on the amount of disruption that would inevitably occur. And they were pretty good, though honestly, I can’t blame them for getting fidgety over the Mother and Father’s dance of Sorrow and Poverty, which felt like it went on forever. And it was pretty funny when I heard the little girl next to me whisper to her mother: “when do the lollies get here?” She had her priorities.

A Gothic carnivalesque expressionist treat, which isn’t exactly Christmassy, but a great way to kick off the holiday season.

The Snowcat Prince by Dina Norlund

This was another good graphic novel for children, though surprisingly slender given the epic subject matter (as usual, nothing less than civilization itself is at stake). However, it’s also surprising just how much world-building is crammed into this volume, supplemented by the beautiful artwork, which is bursting with vibrancy.

Syv is a snowcat and the youngest of seven brothers, all of which are in line for the throne given the cultural traditions of their society. Much like Joseph’s brothers (of the technicolour dreamcoat variety) Syv’s family is threatened by their younger brother’s popularity among the people, and so convince him to undertake a dangerous quest to find a long-lost magical crown that will break the curse on their land.

This crown was forged by their ancestor, the Eldking, many centuries ago, before it was stolen by the evil sandfoxes. If Syv is successful, he will have no doubt proved himself worthy of the throne. If not, he’ll be marked by three black stripes and exiled forever.

So Syv, who is so very, very cute, sets out with nothing but a map that’s said to show the way to the hiding place of the crown in sandfox territory. Joined by a young human girl called Kit, Syv traverses the land, naturally learning plenty about the wider world as he does so, only to be faced with a shocking truth at the end of his journey. I don’t suppose it will come as too much of a surprise to learn that the history he’s been told about snowcats and sandfoxes wasn’t exactly accurate, and Norlund has a clear point to make with it all: “history would never be hidden again, no matter how good or bad.”

More than any other graphic novel I’ve read lately, this reminded me of Teny Issakhanian’s Wingbearer – largely due to the Disney-like artwork. I mean that as a complement, as in both cases you really do feel like you’re looking at an old-school animated feature of the nineties. (That said, the character of Kit is 100% inspired by Medb from Wolfwalkers, from the giant red hair to the cute little canine teeth). There’s also beautiful use of colour, with the snowcats rendered in blue and white, and the sandfoxes in deep red and purples – with surroundings to match, from icy reaches to autumnal forests.

My only real complaint is that the resolution to the problem should have been solved with cunning or communication – instead it’s just our protagonist being in possession of more raw power than his nemesis, which is not only anti-climactic, but feels a bit at odds with the themes of the story. But for the most part, another solid contribution to this Golden Age of graphic novels.

The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag

This is a very cute queer love story about a closeted teenage girl called Morgan who feels completely cut-off from the world around her. Her parents are divorced, her younger brother is angry, and none of her friends know she’s gay. Her plan is to simply get through her high school years, then hightail it out of there.

Then one night she goes down to the water and meets a girl about her age, who saves her life after she slips on some rocks and falls into the ocean. Calling herself Keltie, Morgan kisses her, thinking the whole thing is a dream anyway. At least until the following day, when Keltie turns up on land, clearly enamoured, and telling Morgan she’s a selkie that’s able to come on land every seven years for the sake of true love.

Now Morgan has to hide her newfound girlfriend from the rest of her family and friends, who quickly notice that something has changed about her. It’s a sweet enough little story about coming out and finding love, but – well, aside from the queer content, you’ve read it a million times before (probably with a mermaid instead of a selkie though).

If there are some downsides, it’s that the artwork didn’t really appeal to me. It’s quite rough and cartoony, a bit like She Ra without the pastels. Also, the love story between the two girls isn’t hugely convincing. They meet as kids, reunite as teenagers, and... are immediately in love? What do they talk about? What do they really know about each other?

Finally, the main conflict of the story is resolved almost ridiculously easily: Keltie has come to land partly because a large cruise ship is charting a course around a seal breeding colony, which will destroy the calves nursing there. So Morgan talks to the daughter of the boat owners, who promises to simply tell her parents to chart a course somewhere else. First of all, why would they listen to their teenage daughter, who can provide no reason why she wants them to go off-course? (I kind of preferred Keltie’s plan of just running the boat onto some rocks. More people should do that to rich people’s boats).

Still, I’m glad to see more selkie representation in stories. They’re so underrepresented!

Norroway Book 1: The Black Bull of Norroway by Kit and Cat Seaton

Based on an old Scottish legend, this graphic novel – like a lot of the best fairy tale retellings – fleshes out the characters and their circumstances, even if it frustratingly ends on a cliff-hanger (again, it’s going to be a struggle to remember what’s happening when I finally track down the sequel).

Sybilla is told her fortune when she’s a child: that one day she will become the bride of the Black Bull of Norroway, a man so fierce and bloodthirsty that the king of the land offered up his own daughter to an Old One so that he might be changed into a bull. Sure enough, when Sybilla comes of age, the bull turns up at her doorstep and invites her on an adventure.

With nothing at home to live for, she goes with him – though Sybilla is no meek wilting violet. She’s got a lot to say and plenty of questions to ask, though frustratingly none of the characters she meets along the way are prepared to give her a straight answer. This is the downside of the story: clearly all the answers, and the overarching shape of the story, are being saved for the next instalment.

Another small problem: sometimes the speech bubbles aren’t pointed clearly to who’s doing the talking, meaning there are some panels in which the conversations are rather garbled.

Plenty of other fairy tale trappings are woven into the narrative, from “The Glass Mountain” to “The Red Shoes” (in that there’s a princess with no feet) as well as things like hagstone, which coincidentally also turn up in Coraline and The Mark of Cain, see below. The artwork very much reminds me of the Delilah Dirke books – not hugely detailed, but very kinetic and lively.

The original fairy tale has a lot of similar beats to “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” only with the polar bear swapped out for a bull. I suppose the next book in the series will show us whether other plot-points will be adapted for this retelling, such as the false bride, a shirt that can only be cleaned by the heroine, an arbitrary rule that gets broken, and a troll/witch who tries to get the knight/prince married to her own daughter instead. It’s a good read, but very much the first part of a longer story.

Mary Anne and Too Many Boys by Anne M. Martin

We are now in the sixth rotation of books, which started with Dawn’s Wicked Stepsister and will skip Mallory entirely (Dawn sidles in with two books to her name). And clocking in at book #34, we get Mary Anne as a narrator AGAIN? We’ve just had her in book #30, not to mention her getting the framing device in The Babysitters Winter Vacation. It feels way too soon for another Mary Anne book, especially as she’s easily shaping up to be the most badly dated of the characters.

See, it’s not that Mary Anne is necessarily any better than Kristy, Claudia, Stacey or the rest, it’s that the text is constantly telling us that she’s the sensitive one, the shy one, the warm and kind-hearted one, while simultaneously depicting her as a pretty self-centred, occasionally very spiteful, teenage girl. Which would be fine, were it not for the ongoing reassurances that she isn’t any of those things, creating a dissonance in the reader’s mind that starts to grate on your nerves after a while.

It kicks off at a Babysitters Club meeting, in which the girls are excitedly discussing their summer holiday plans. She and Stacey are going back to Sea City with the Pike family as parent helpers for their large brood of children, though I’ll say straight-up that this vacation gets far less “screentime” than it did in Boy Crazy Stacey, when the girls had fun with the kids in various locations such as the boardwalk, beach, novelty restaurants and mini-golf course, which made up the best part of the book.

Here we spend barely any time with the kids, but rather with the “too many boys” of the title – which amounts to three in total. As you may or may not recall, Stacey and Mary Anne’s previous trip to Sea City ended with them going on a date with two other parent helpers: Alex and Toby. This year, they’re back in Sea City as well (what are the odds?) and Mary Anne is conflicted about whether or not she should spend time with Toby given that she has a steady boyfriend now.

In one of the other subplots, Vanessa gets a crush on a twelve-year-old boy called Chris who works at an ice cream parlour (I guess there are no child labour regulation laws in Sea City) and sends him a couple of anonymous love letters. Unfortunately, he thinks they’re from the more age-appropriate Mallory, and organizes a date with her at a time they’re scheduled to leave. Vanessa’s bittersweet solution is to write him one last love poem, so that she can express her sorrow, he can go on thinking Mallory liked him, and Mallory is left none the wiser.

There are also a couple of single-chapter stories with the other babysitters: Jessi has to deal with a missing hamster, Kristy sits Jackie the walking disaster at a public pool, and Dawn (while staying with her father in California) realizes that her brother is shaping up to be a pretty good babysitter after their father’s girlfriend Carol foists her friend’s colic-stricken infant on them for the evening. Also, Dawn and Jeff watch an unspecified Indiana Jones movie, which made me smile because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the past few months.

It's all something of a disappointment since Boy Crazy Stacey felt like a real event, in which two of the characters leave Stoneybrook for the first time and embark on something that’s almost a coming-of-age drama. This time around, Sea City felt very blasé.

Stacey and the Mystery of Stoneybrook by Anne M. Martin

I had been looking forward to this one. Truly there is no greater joy, nor anything that better defines my mid-childhood, than an Apple Paperback of the ghost and/or mystery variety. And if the Babysitters Club or Sweet Valley Twins are involved, then so much the better.

More than that, I was in the delightful position of knowing I’d enjoyed this one (as the battered spine and cover attested) while not remembering much about it. Reading Mary Anne’s Bad Luck Mystery out on the porch in the sun a few months ago was one of the highlights of this Babysitters Club re-read.

Unfortunately, the Suck Fairy came to visit. I still enjoyed it, but obviously my expectations were a little too high for what is (in truth) a cheap paperback that was probably written over the course of a weekend. It starts with Stacey returning from a trip to New York, and more attention is drawn to her health (Mary Anne also described her as being “too pale” in the previous book). At the next Babysitters Club meeting, a phone call from Doctor Johanssen comes with a special request: she and her husband are leaving for a week to attend to the latter’s ailing father, and they want Charlotte to stay at Jessi or Stacey’s house while they’re away.

The Ramseys are unavailable, so Stacey excitedly checks with her mother and takes the job, making this the first time that a babysitting charge has actually stayed at the house of a babysitter (though let’s be honest, Mrs McGill should be the one getting paid for this, not a thirteen-year-old. Actually, in saying that I’m not entirely sure whether this was a proper babysitter job or just a favour between friends).

In any case, Charlotte is horribly homesick, and Stacey tries to distract her with talk of the old Hennessey place – a house that has lost the historical preservation battle, and so is currently getting its fixtures pulled out before the house is demolished and a developer builds condos on the site. While the girls are exploring the property, they experience all manner of eerie phenomena: a figure standing in an upstairs window who disappears a moment later, a strange moaning sound, a swarm of flies at the back of the house, and – creepiest of all – a fire at the window that isn’t there by the time Stacey hauls a wheelbarrow full of rainwater up to the house to extinguish it. She touches the wooden frame, and it’s not even warm!

Hmm, distract a child from their absent parents by scaring the shit out of them with a haunted house? Genius!

It transpires that all the girls have had strange nightmares about the house over the years, and Kristy decides that some research into the place is warranted. She’s the one that discovers the place was built over the most sacred spot of an old cemetery, though the prose is hideously obtuse in explaining how. While looking through an old book on Stoneybrook, Kristy discovers an old map, and we get this description:

It looked hand-drawn, and the locations were all hand-lettered. She turned it this way and that, trying to figure out how it related to the town she knew. It was a very early map of Stoneybrook. Only a scattering of houses were shown, along with a bank and a church. The church was still there, and so was... the house itself. Kristy had finally located “our” old house. At first she couldn’t quite make out the writing in the area in and around the house. What did it say?

“Oh, my lord,” said Kristy out loud. From what she could see on this incredibly old map, Kristy figured out that the entire town of Stoneybrook had been built over ancient burial grounds. And “our” house was built on – oh, my lord – the most sacred spot of all.”

That’s all we get on the subject, and I have so many questions. First of all, presumably by “ancient burial ground” they mean First Nation people – but how is this indicated on the map? By what signifier? How would the original map-maker have known this, and if it was your bog-standard colonist, why would they bother identifying it as such anyway? And what on earth does it mean by “most sacred spot of all?” What makes it sacred? How is it marked as such in relation to the house, which was presumably built by this point since it also appears on the map? And again, how did whoever drew the map know that this was the most sacred area?

It's just so unclear!

In any case, the girls find the address of an elderly man called Ronald Hennessey who used to live in the house. During their visit to the nursing home, he spins them a number of tales about all the ghosts and ghouls that used to haunt him as a child, and no one is quite sure whether to believe him or not.

On the day of the demolition, Kristy’s brothers end up talking to the workmen and come up with logical explanations for each of the strange things that Stacey saw: the figure in the window was a workman staying late, the moaning was the half-dismantled pipes, the flies were actually a disturbed swarm of bees, and the mysterious fire was due to a workman using an acetylene torch to loosen the bathtub (though that doesn’t explain how Stacey didn’t see him when she rushed up to the window with the wheelbarrow full of water). 

So everything has a rational explanation except for the weird nightmares everyone was having, which we can chalk down to the overactive imaginations of teenage girls (remember when they all thought they were under a bad luck curse?)

But then, when Stacey and Charlotte and the rest of the neighbourhood gather around to watch the house get knocked down, this happens:

Just then, I saw something very awful. The house – what was left of it – suddenly went up in flames. The fire crackled and roared as it engulfed the wreckage. I looked around, terrified. What should we do? But everybody was just standing there, looking slightly bored. Kristy had wandered off to talk to Sam. Charlotte was watching one of the workmen pack his tools away into his truck. No one else seemed to see the fire! I turned back to check again. Maybe I’d been imagining things once more. But the flames were even higher by now. Smoke curled up as the fire moved quickly through the tumbledown structure. And then, just as in my dream, I saw a figure. It was calling for help. It looked like an old, old man. Was it – could it be – Mr Hennessey? I couldn’t believe my eyes.

She gets distracted by Charlotte and when she looks back, there’s no fire to be seen. Only now she’s overtaken by an overwhelming need to go and see Mr Hennessey, so she rushes to the nursing home, where she discovers that (you guessed it) he died the night before.

Okay, so what the heck just happened here? Did Stacey just hallucinate a burning house? Or was it a genuine supernatural occurrence? And if it was a vision sent to her, why was it so terrifying and yet so pointless since Mr Hennessey is already dead by the time she gets to the nursing home?

It’s a weird one, folks. Just a few more minor notes: the house is situated on the not-subtly-named Elm Street (though I wouldn’t have clocked that reference as a kid) and of course, the ole “built on sacred burial grounds” shtick comes straight from Poltergeist. There’s even a direct mention of The Amityville Horror, which Stacey and Claudia have watched on the sly.

There’s a cute chapter when Charlotte attends a Babysitters Club meeting and acts like she’s at the Met Gala, and on suggesting a game of Cluedo, Stacey tells her: “you can be Miss Scarlet.” Heh. Everyone wanted to be Miss Scarlet. At another point they read a chapter of Charlotte’s Web and Charlotte comments: “I’m proud to have the same name as that spider.” Aww.

Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets by Dav Pilkey

Yes, it was extremely embarrassing to type out that title and post it on my Tumblr reading list for this month. Just so we’re clear, I’m doing this for WORK and for the KIDS, so that I can have conversations with them about their favourite books. Ahem.

In any case, this is the second book in the Captain Underpants series, which sees troublemakers George and Harold looking forward to their school’s annual Invention Convention. But having glued their entire class to chairs last year, their nemesis Principal Krupp has other ideas about allowing them to attend.

In response, the boys sneak into the gymnasium the night before the event to tamper with the invention, only to discover Melvin Sneedly putting the finishing touches on his Photo-Atomic Trans-Somgobulating Yectofantriplutoniczanziptomiser (or PANSY), a machine that will bring to life anything it photocopies. I’m sure you can see where this is going, especially since the boys have just written a comic about Captain Underpants fighting sentient toilets.

“Oh no! Melvin was right! The Photo-Atomic Trans-Somgobulating Yectofantriplutoniczanziptomiser really DOES create living, breathing, three-dimensional copies of two-dimensional images!” Harold cried convolutedly.

They need a hero, and with a click of their fingers they can call upon Captain Underpants (the hypnotized Principal Krupp) to don his underwear and discard his topee in order to do battle with the attacking toilets. Kids love this stuff, and there’s enough funny wordplay and droll humour to keep curmudgeonly adults mildly entertained as well (Chapter Twenty-Two is called “To Make a Long Story Short” and is comprised of a single sentence, affirming that a robot created to clean up the aftermath of battle does in fact do so).

As in the previous book, this also contains a Dog Man comic, a double-spread of facts about the author, and what’s called “Flip-o-Rama” in which two pages must be flipped back and forth quickly to create the illusion of movement (it’s... not very impressive).

The Bad Guys: Mission Unpluckable by Aaron Blabey

This story kicks off right on the heels of the first book’s ending, with a news reel about how a gang of bad guys broke into the pound and frightened two hundred puppies into fleeing their cages. Watching from home, Wolf, Shark, Snake and Piranha are furious at this misrepresentation. They were helping those puppies escape captivity!

But turning good is the brainchild of Wolf, and he has another cunning plan to prove to the world that he and his cohorts are good guys now: to free the chickens at a nearby battery farm.

The team organize a prison break with the help of another bad guy trying to turn his life around: Tarantula, a hacker who has the plan all figured out – if only they can all work together. Not helping is that Shark is absolutely terrified of spiders, and Snake (who was on the verge of quitting this endeavour) is now drooling at the thought of that many chickens.

Cue some Mission Impossible hijinks: Shark in drag, Piranha disguising himself as a sardine sandwich, and Snake being faced with the irresistible promise of a massive chicken dinner. It’s pretty amusing how oblivious Wolf is to Snake’s blatantly obvious bloodlust, and (on the other end of the spectrum) rather touching how they eventually get all the chickens out (the birds have to follow a Mother Hen, and Shark is up for the challenge).

By the end of the story, it would seem that our heroes have a nemesis – and it makes perfect sense that it’s a guinea pig.

I definitely prefer The Bad Guys to Captain Underpants, not only is the artwork better (those animals are so expressive!) but the humour is a little less juvenile. I know that’s a stupid thing to say against a book called Captain Underpants, but let’s just say that both these series have been adapted into films, and I’m only eying one of them as a potential watch...

The Mark of Cain by Lindsey Barraclough

This is the sequel to Long Lankin, though it could also be fairly described as a companion piece, as reading the first book isn’t entirely necessary to understand the basics of this one – even if it does involve all the same characters four years later. After the terrifying events of Long Lankin (which I read last month) sisters Cora and Mimi are brought back to Bryden Guerdon by their hapless father, who plans to do it all up.

Although Lankin was defeated thanks to the sacrifice of Aunt Ida, the witch who assisted him in the murder of the lady of the house and her infant son in the 1500s still prowls the area in spirit-gorm. The first few chapters of the book recount the life of Aphra Rushes, her fosterage with two cunning women, her meeting with the outcast leper Cain Lankin, and finally her stint as a wetnurse in the Guerdon household and subsequent execution when she’s found guilty of witchcraft. Cheerful stuff.

We then move forward in time to Cora and Mimi in the post-WWII years, and the best thing about this story is that it very much takes into account the traumatizing effect of the experiences they went through in the previous book. That goes ditto for the village boy Roger and his brother Pete, who were also present when Lankin attacked the girls in the manor house.

Mimi is silent and clingy, and because Cora cannot bear to have her out of sight, she has very few friends or social skills. Roger is certainly not the cheerful chap he was in his youth, and even Pete (who was only tangentially involved with events) becomes angry and resentful whenever the girls show up at his house. It’s sad, since none of this is their fault, but his reaction to them makes complete sense.

So, the girls returning to Bryden Guerdon is something that absolutely nobody wants, and sure enough, strange things start happening almost immediately. Mimi claims she can see someone in the garden. The girls’ “Aunt” Kathy (actually their father’s girlfriend) gets spooked and returns to London. Strange witch-bottles are found in the old barn, filled with hair, blood and fingernails. Symbols are drawn on the doors and hagstones found hanging from the porch.

It's all a bit of a slow-burn horror story, and one that I didn’t necessarily think was scarier than the previous book, though Barraclough is an expert at showing and not telling (always the best way to do horror). Likewise, she’s good at interspersing the scary parts with scenes of warm domesticity or humour, such as Cora and Roger accidentally getting drunk on mead, or the chaos of Roger’s family home.

I was able to enjoy this one more than Long Lankin, as I could give it my full attention over a three-day weekend binge, and I was once again reminded of Anne Pilling and Catherine Fisher, who have each written similar stories in regards to the book’s heavy atmosphere and their use of ancient history echoing into contemporary times.

There were a few loose threads left dangling: I thought the spirits Aphra’s foster mothers called up at the beginning of the book would have a larger part to play (they sounded interesting!) and the fate of Cora and Mimi’s mother is left ambiguous (if anyone deserved a reprieve from suffering, it was her).

But definitely a good read, if not just for the prose and atmosphere. At some point in the distant future, I hope to re-read Long Lankin and give it the close-reading it deserves.

The Witch and the Tsar by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore

I have been picking through this one slowly but surely over the last few months, which pretty much sums up the reading experience: not bad, but not exactly compelling. There are always a couple of popular trends going around literary circles, and at the moment it’s taking a well-known female figure from mythology and retelling her story with a feminist slant, and of course: Slavic fantasy.

This book combines the two by centring a story around Baba Yaga, who has appeared frequently in the books I’ve been reading across the course of the year, though never in the capacity of a protagonist.

Unfortunately, her upgrade to main character means she has to be changed into a young and beautiful demi-goddess, because saints forbid we have to read about an old hag for four hundred pages. According to the author’s note at the back of the book (which also includes a glossary for the historical people, mythological characters and real locations featured in the story) Gilmore drew upon both ancient Slavic mythology and Russian history to craft her narrative – specifically Ivan the Terrible’s reign of terror and deities such as Perun, Dazhbog, Mokosh and Belobog/Chernobog (as well as appearances from famous figures such as Koshey the Deathless and Marya Morevna).

It's always something of a questionable choice to take real-life atrocities and spin them as the results of feuding gods (Catherynne Valente did the same in Deathless) but I’m not going to cast any moral judgment on this. It’s only from a storytelling perspective that you can tell many of Gilmore’s original plots have to work within the context of the history she’s chosen to write about, making everything feel a little restrictive as a result.

There are really three parts of the novel: Yaga’s prolonged youth spent deep within the forest, providing healing and succour to those in need (in her chicken-legged house of course, which sadly doesn’t have much of a role to play in this story), which is followed by her travelling to the court of the tsar after his wife (an old friend) beseeches her to come. There she must tend to the tsarina’s failing health while negotiating the power-plays at court.

Finally, she takes to the Russian wilderness with a number of other warriors who are rebelling against the increasingly tyrannical hold that Tsar Ivan has on the country. Fighting against his ruthless oprichnina, Yaga still finds the time to make friends, fall in love, give birth to a daughter, and play cat-and-mouse games with Koshey Bessmertny, her former lover (if that name sounds familiar, then yes, he is a variation on Koshei the Deathless).

I am no expert on Russian history, so I simply cannot attest to the accuracy of the historical persons or events in this book, though I’ve seen a couple of reviews that point out a number of the usual stereotypes and clichés that Western-based writers often affix to Russian-inspired stories. Furthermore, this was published just last year, which is probably not the best timing for a novel extolling the beauty and strength of Mother Russia.

But to judge it as simply a novel that spotlights a famous female character from mythology... it’s fine.

The thing that’s been bugging me about this influx of women-centred retellings of myths (seriously, there are so many, no doubt brought on by Madeline Miller’s Circe) is that they have nothing particularly interesting to say about women. More often than not the protagonists are ludicrously anachronistic portrayals of them, in which they dream about romance and rail against the patriarchy, with the ideals and opinions of an essentially modern (and distinctly American) woman. 

Look, I like stories about kickass women. I like stories about women who flout social mores and the great reserves of strength and courage it takes to do so. I like stories that centre on women, especially when based on the myths and legends I grew up with. But what I would like to see more of are stories in which women are allowed to be three-dimensional and of her time. Isn’t the whole point of these feminist retellings to explore womanhood within a variety of different historical contexts?

Apparently not, as there’s a weird obsession these days with allowing women to “have it all”. This means that not only must she be a perfect role model, but that she’ll never be called upon to lose or sacrifice anything. (Whenever an author dares to exact a price from her heroine, she’ll be accused of misogyny – as when Alina gave up her powers to save the world in Shadow and Bone).

These stories are under the weird burden of having to be empowering to their readership, which can’t help but undermine the stakes of any given story. And I can promise you that at some point all of these women will fall in love with the “right guy”, who worships her and treats her with a surprising amount of respect and is super-hot. All that work at being strong independent women, and these stories still manage to revolve around nabbing a dude. Because she has to “have it all.”

Basically, the Yaga presented in this story has no dark side, which is pretty astounding considering the source material, and is instead a twenty-first century woman transported to sixteenth-century Russia. The biggest crime is that she’s just rather bland, and if this was an attempt to restore Baba Yaga to her original status as a goddess (as the afterword implies) after being disparaged as merely a witch by centuries of false storytelling, then it really didn’t do much to achieve that goal.

Where’s her complexity? The rage? The darkness? The nuance? We’ve traded in the witch for another nondescript period romance heroine, all the better for the reader to easily project themselves onto.

Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott

Another book in my reading list of Slavic-based fairy tales, though this is the first one to come under the subgenre of magic realism. That is to say, nobody blinks an eye at the existence of a chicken-legged house getting bequeathed to a couple of adult siblings living in America, who then travel in it across the country. (Even stranger, there are a couple of mentions of other buildings that have grown eyeballs, but this has no impact on the story whatsoever. As world-building minutia goes, it’s a little weird).

I had very little idea of what to expect from this one, and it was a good read, albeit not quite as gripping or memorable as I wanted it to be. The writing style is suitably intricate and poetic, but the author credits Angela Carter as an inspiration in her afterword, and there’s no way the prose holds a candle to her – but then, what does?

(As an aside, I’m noticing an increase in authors that provide long lists of inspirations and dedications in their afterwords, and it comes across as a little juvenile – not to mention making me feel like I should have been reading or watching something else entirely. Emily Duncan also did it for Wicked Saints, explicitly stating that she based one of her characters on Kylo Ren, and all that achieved was me deciding not to read the rest of the trilogy. Here, Nethercott even namedrops Buffy the Vampire Slayer, calling it “the greatest story ever told” without any context as to how it relates to the novel we’ve just read. I don’t care how much you liked your formative books/television shows/characters, if you bring them to mind then I’m only going to compare them unfavourably to your own work).

Back to Thistlefoot. It vibes a fair bit with Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, what with characters that turn out to be the personifications of concepts, a road trip across America, a litany of payoffs for carefully strewn Chekhov Skills, colourful characters that are at least 70% an aesthetic (I’m pretty sure any given assortment of outfits, tattoos, boots and hairstyles are given more emphasis than any single character’s interiority) and solemn speeches on the importance of stories.

Isaac and Bellatine Yaga are two estranged siblings brought together unexpectedly when a package arrives from overseas, bequeathed to them both by their deceased great-grandmother. Because they’re in a magic realism setting, they’re not too dumbstruck on discovering that their inheritance is the legendary chicken-legged house straight from the Baba Yaga legends, which (like the Tardis) is considerably larger on the inside and able to transport them wherever they want to go.

As it happens, the siblings have other gifts from their Ukrainian heritage: Isaac is able to mimic strangers to an almost uncanny degree, while Bellatine can bring inanimate objects to life with her hands. Realizing that his sister wants to own the house and see the back of him, Isaac comes up with an idea to get them both what they want: go on the road with the marionette show they performed with their parents as children until Bellatine can buy him out.

His sister doesn’t like the idea, as she’s been suppressing her magical gift to the same extent that Isaac has been exploiting his, but the desire to own this magical house for herself is just too great. So, the Yaga siblings take their show on the road, unaware of just how many people are on their tail.

The more I think about it, the more the comparison to American Gods applies, especially since several interspersing chapters told from the point-of-view of the house itself, giving it the chance to recount its own history. Basically, it’s one of those novels that is good without being great. Really beautifully written with some solid ideas throughout, but I’ve seen much of it done better in other books. Or maybe that’s just because Nethercott wrote down all her inspirations in the afterword. Seriously, writers should really stop doing that.

The Second Bell by Gabriela Houston

I’m surprised that this book wasn’t classified as YA for several reasons: the basic prose, the short chapters, the straightforward story. I whizzed through it in no time, and will probably forget it just as quickly.

Based on the Polish myth of the Striga (or Strzyga), these creatures were said to be female demons born to ordinary women, identifiable by their two hearts, two shadows and evil powers. They also popped up in Aleksandra Ross’s Don’t Call the Wolf as straightforward monsters to be fought and killed, though here they’re given the “just misunderstood because of the patriarchy” treatment.

Whenever a striga child is born to a mortal woman, the mother is given a choice: to abandon her infant on the side of the mountain and return to her ordinary life, or go with said child into permanent exile. Most chose to stay, but this story opens with Miriat refusing to abandon her daughter, and facing the brutal consequences: complete and immediate ostracization.

Driven out of her community with little but the clothes on her back, Miriat struggles through the wilderness to reach a striga settlement in the mountains. It’s there that she raises Salka to adolescence, though the striga community comes with its own societal difficulties. Not a simple haven for those that have been cast out, it’s filled with deeply traumatized and poverty-stricken inhabitants, who have their own rules and hierarchies, one of which is that any striga living among them must never call upon their supernatural powers.

Should this ever happen, then the individual will face yet another exile… and it’s unlikely they would survive this one given the unforgiving nature of their surroundings, where food is scarce and nights are bitterly cold.

As a teenager, Salka is inevitably headstrong and wilful, because is there any other kind of heroine in a book like this? (Again, I’m bewildered it wasn’t shelved in the YA area). She’s curious about her dual hearts and the power she has that everyone else is so afraid of, but knows that if she gives her shadow-self even an inch, she’ll be unable to control its influence. Or so she’s been told. 

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that all the stories about the dangers of the striga are largely fabricated, and many of their abilities are actually beneficial to the community. And when it becomes apparent that some of the striga can heal mortal wounds and illnesses, society’s terrified persecution of these people becomes a little strange. I mean, these are profoundly helpful skills to have in an environment like the one described in this book, so how and why did striga become so hated? What is the history behind this xenophobia? What even are the strigas if not the demons they’ve been labelled as? A major problem of the book is that we never get a clear picture of what they are or why people have become so afraid of them.

Okay, so we could infer that it’s fear of the unknown and/or women with power, but the story is filled with Dola (wise women) that everyone turns to for advice and help in times of trouble, which rather undermines the vaguely patriarchal-based oppression. This world has problems, but sexism doesn’t seem to be one of them. It’s all completely unclear, and remains unresolved by the end of the book.

Basically, the story isn’t particularly deep. Prejudice is bad. Familial bonds are good. That’s about as deep as it gets, and the story’s conclusion is almost unbearably trite. All those centuries of fear and oppression are wiped away in a (literal) flood. Save a few kids from the waters, and everyone can get along.

Although the bond between Miria and Salka is touching, especially in a genre that very rarely bothers with strong connections between mothers and daughters, they’re not hugely interesting characters. Some of the supporting ones are more intriguing, such as Dran: the son of a Dola who was born with a bad leg. He believes that a striga might be able to to heal his disability, which leads him to an ongoing argument with himself over whether getting what he wants is worth the consequences that will befall Salka if he successfully convinces her to use her striga powers. (At best, she’ll be exiled, at worst, she’ll become the monstrous demon that his people believe all striga are).

He’s not a great person, but that’s a far more interesting moral conundrum than anything Miriat or Salka have to face. Sadly, the rest of the women in the book are pretty one-dimensional, and rather antagonistic toward our mother/daughter protagonists. I’m always torn on this sort of thing – on the one hand, it’s juvenile and reductive to believe that all women are going to be best friends with each other; on the other, they’re antagonistic in such boring ways: one is romantically jealous, one is overprotective of her son, one just has a chip on her shoulder about everything. If you’re going to pit female characters against each other, at least give them decent reasons to do so.

It’s a quick, largely inoffensive read, but not one I can see retaining any sort of hold on my ever-waning memory banks.

Dog Soldiers (2002)

Obviously, there were a couple of werewolf-based carry-overs that I wasn’t able to finish in October, of which Dog Soldiers was one. Something of a cult classic since its release (aren’t they all) it’s essentially “soldiers versus werewolves.” A squad of British army men are going through a routine training exercise in the Scottish Highlands only to come across the remains of another team that has been torn to shreds with only one survivor.

Rescued by a zoologist who is researching the strange disappearances in the area, and stymied by a commanding officer who is clearly responsible for getting them into this mess in the first place, the platoon ends up barricaded inside an abandoned farmhouse, fending off the attack from werewolves that manage to look both terrible (rubber masks are clearly at work) and terrifying (hey, I’ll take practical effects any day of the week, and the elongated legs are genuinely unsettling).

Such a simple premise is obviously not conductive to a particularly interesting synopsis. Suffice to say, there’s a lot of screaming, swearing, bloodshed and creatively gruesome deaths. Liam Cunningham and Kevin McKidd are always reliable (though I always get the latter mixed up with Steven Waddington) and it was amusing to see Sean Pertwee since he was also in the season of Elementary that I watched this month.

It's hardly a cinematic masterpiece, but it’s all worth it for the devastating final shot: a headline that announces “werewolves ate my platoon” before zooming out and revealing the greater part of the frontpage is taken up with the results of a footy game that the men were complaining about missing for the duration of the film. I feel like they probably came up with that shot, then reverse-engineered the entire movie as a lead-up to it.

Coraline (2009)

Ah, that’s the stuff. What a wonderful, immersive, gorgeous, spooky, thrilling joyride of a movie (that will also scare the heck out of you). It’s stunning to look at, and – as you’d expect from a Gaiman-based story – taps deep into the rhythms and echoes of old fairy tales to construct something that feels familiar and yet fresh every time you watch it.

It was apparently rereleased in cinemas earlier this year, and I’m not surprised to hear it pulled in a couple of million. I’d definitely pay to rewatch this on the big screen (despite having the DVD) over any Star Wars or MCU flick in a heartbeat. 

Coraline was also our annual Halloween night movie pick, an event which has been whittled down to only two people, one of whom (me) doesn’t even work there anymore. But my ex-colleague had never seen it before, and I’ll take any excuse to watch it again. In fact, immediately after watching I wanted to put it back to the beginning and watch it all over again. It’s one of those films you never get tired of, and which is detailed enough to let you notice something new every time.

Like, for example, the fact that the cat talks in the Other Mother’s world but not Coraline’s, making him the exact inverse of Wybie, who talks aplenty to Coraline in the real world, but whose Other Mother counterpart is silent. The film also knows what it’s doing when it comes to hinting at a much larger backdrop to the events that unfold: clearly the Beldame and the cat have a history, and the allusions to Wybie’s grandmother and her missing twin sister are an ever-present reminder of what could happen to Coraline if she doesn’t stay on her guard.

Even Mr Bobinsky’s mice, who apparently use him to deliver a warning to Coraline at the beginning of the film (“do not go through the little door”) are left enticingly mysterious.

Granted, there were a few nitpicks this time around. I wish they had introduced the hagstone more elegantly, and that Coraline’s search to find the missing eyes had stretched on for a bit longer. Also, the sequence isn’t as clever as it could have been – she doesn’t even rely on her wits at any point.

And of course, the presence of Wybie has always been a bit of an issue, from the fact that the only significant Black character is rendered completely silent in the Other Mother’s world (and ends up fluttering from a flagpole) and that he undermines our heroine by leaping in at the last minute to save her from the Other Mother’s severed hand. In the book she handles it all by herself. And what was Wybie doing out by himself so late at night anyway?

Also, why does the Other Mother need the doll to spy on Coraline when the stuffed mice are serving that same purpose? And where does this doll end up, anyway? I lost track of it.

But like I said, those are just nitpicks. Watching this for the umpteenth time I was struck by the allure of the Other Mother’s world: the food, the fun, the colour, the music, the thrills. A part of you wishes for a movie (or a reality!) where such things are just as they seem; an uncomplicated treat, where there is no catch or price to pay. But if that were the case, we’d be in Enid Blyton territory.

Heck, I just saw a variation of Coraline all over again in the Hansel and Gretel ballet: the siblings are allowed to gorge themselves on all the treats they can eat, but when they wake up, they’re in the witch’s kitchen and it’s time to pay the piper. The transience of the extravagances is the reason we must savour them, to the point where the transgression feels well worth the consequences... if you can sidle out of them. 

About Time (2013)

According to my sister, this movie is the reason I have a nephew, which isn’t something I want to dwell on in too much detail. She only meant that the film made having a family look so appealing that she and her partner decided to start one of their own.

Of course, once you announce that a movie is responsible for bringing an entirely new person into the world, your expectations are pretty damn high. And given it’s from the writer of Notting Hill and Love Actually, you know there’s going to be a high amount of sentimentality involved – along with a scattering of caustic humour that feels all the more biting due to the aforementioned sentimentality.

Tim is self-described as “too tall, too skinny, too orange” when his father springs a family secret on him when he turns twenty-one: the men in their family can time travel. All he has to do is enter a small dark space and imagine where he wants to go. It has to be within his own lifetime, and he can change things once he’s there – hopefully for the better. Not taking any of this remotely seriously, Tim heads for the nearest cupboard, wishes himself back to New Year’s Eve, and fixes a few of the faux pas he committed on that night.

It's all real. He can time travel. But what commences is not at all what you would imagine: Tim moves through time and space, but the movie isn’t interested in any of the metaphysical implications of this. It is profoundly not a science-fiction movie. Rather, it’s a story about a young man developing into a grown man who can just happen to time travel, learning a little more about himself and the world as he does so.

Some of this involves meeting and falling in love with Mary (Rachel McAdams in another time travel movie in which she does none of the actual traveling) but the story also explores Tim’s relationship with his parents, sister, uncle, work colleagues, first love, friends and a couple of complete strangers. It’s a portrayal of the simple joys of a meaningful but mundane life, in which the time travel only serves to accentuate how special everything is without it.

(Of course, Tim’s father also reveals that he utilized time travel mainly in order to read absolutely everything under the sun, and holy shit wouldn’t that be wonderful? Unlimited time to just read).

So the whole thing putters along, past the usual end point of most romantic comedies (the wedding) and into Tim’s middle age and fatherhood, only occasionally dipping into some time travelling conundrums and paradoxes (I won’t go into it, but Arrow’s Sara Diggle comes to mind at one point). As in any Richard Curtis film, the main character is surrounded by charming eccentrics, with special mention given to Tom Hollander’s Harry (Tim’s landlord/flatmate) and Richard Cordery’s Desmond (Tim’s uncle). I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up becoming one or the other in my dotage.

Somewhat more disappointing is Tim’s sister Kit Kat, who he introduces as “the most wonderful thing in the world” who goes on to never say or do anything particularly interesting or special across the entire course of the movie. It’s an almost too-perfect case of a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl, who somehow doesn’t even fulfil that trope’s usual role as a love interest to the main character. 

But it’s a very charming movie, and somehow one that slipped under the radar a bit. If you need some cheering up, or a good cry, or both, this might be the ticket.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

Another leftover from October’s werewolf viewing, this doesn’t actually involve a werewolf – only a psychopath killer who dresses like one (which is kind of cheating, since early on we get a glimpse of the creature and there’s no way a human being could pull off that level of speed, agility, or inverted knee joints).

Jim Cummings is a cop in a small Utah town, grappling with an ex-wife, estranged daughter, drinking problem, and father in ill-health who refuses to retire. And now a bunch of brutal serial killings that he can’t stop or solve, leading to increased hostility from the public. It’s no wonder this guy lives entirely on his nerves, and it’s difficult to watch and not be mentally begging the guy to get some therapy.

The most interesting thing about this movie is that it takes the time to flesh out the victims in the hours before they’re horribly murdered, meaning that when they do meet their tragic ends, you really feel like something terrible has just happened. It’s not just random explosions of blood and meat. The screenplay even takes the time to throw in a few red herrings, as when the boyfriend of the first victim confronts a pair of rednecks who are using a homophobic slur, suggesting a personal history that never gets explained on-screen. And after his would-be fiancée’s death, there’s no stinting on the aftermath. This guy is severely traumatized and will clearly remain so for the rest of his life.

And yet it remains a dark comedy, most of which can be derived from the sheer ineptitude of everyone working on the case, the slick editing, and the extremity of the situation leading to lots and lots of gallows humour (I mean, it’s hard to find the funny in the brutal misogynistic killings of half-a-dozen women, but it’s there). Yet there’s a deep sadness to it all as well, from Jenna Marshall’s obvious familiarity with her father’s drunken stupors, to the litany of funerals in which the grief is raw and in-your-face, to Jim Cummings’s obvious and desperate need for help. Any help.

Kudos to the film, it ends with him stepping down as police chief and working on his anger management, so that aspect at least isn’t fully played for laughs.

I’m not entirely sure what to say about it, as the tone is razer-sharp and walks a very fine line between comedy and horror. There’s a real darkness to it all, especially with the reveal of the killer (it’s one of those “darkness lies just beneath the surface of society” stories) and sheer desperation of its protagonist.

Werewolves Within (2021)

I watched this with a friend the same night as The Wolf of Snow Hollow, and we had a laugh over the fact that our two werewolf movies didn’t seem to have any actual werewolves in them. Eventually the last five minutes of the film delivered, but it was touch-and-go for a while.

Apparently based on a video game of the same name, Werewolves Within is another dark comedy, though veering more towards the comedy than the darkness in this case. Mild-mannered forest ranger Finn Wheeler is reassigned to a small town that’s divided over a proposed pipeline that businessman Sam Parker is keen to see constructed under the township (under the guise of creating more jobs of course).

Finn quickly meets and befriends mailperson Cecily Moore, as well as a range of eclectic townsfolk that seem to be in a subconscious competition to out-eccentric each other.

That night, a blizzard knocks out all the power in town, leading most of the residents to seek shelter at a holiday lodge, where – you guessed it – they start getting murdered one-by-one. We’re in a whodunnit, and it’s up to poor, nerve-wracked, underpaid and out-of-his-depth Finn to find the culprit before it’s too late. 

There are some pretty solid comedic talents here (special mention to Harvey Guillén as one-half of a gay couple who monitors everything he says in case of causing offense while being surrounded by people who literally could not give a damn) and plenty of zingers, but it grows increasingly silly as the night goes on, till we’re dealing with gas explosions and pin-point accurate axe throwing.

I’d say fun while it lasts, but a tad forgettable – though it’s worth saying (SPOILERS) that in both this and The Wolf of Snow Hollow, it’s a female character who gets to make the big climactic kill of the titular wolf.

Scream 6 (2023)

No, I’m not using the Roman numerals. It’s Scream 6, dammit.

When it comes to franchises of this nature, you go in wondering how they’re going to play with the trademark beats. Who will give the “this is how it goes in the movies” spiel? How will the killer be unmasked? At this point, it’s all about messing with the established formula.

SPOILERS

There’s no more lasting tradition than the cold open, in which a young woman gets a phone call and ends up fighting for her life (though everyone forgets that Scream 2 avoided this entirely). Last time, the twist was that the girl survived. This time, it’s that the killer unmasks himself immediately after killing the first girl, and then casually go about his routine. Of course, since this is Scream, there’s a twist on that twist, and soon he’s taken out by another masked assailant who asks – just before the fatal stab: “who gives a shit about scary movies?”

So whatever’s going on here, the motive at least is something quite different.

After 2011’s Scream 4 was meant to be a restarter, it ended up being Scream 5 that re-galvanized the franchise. How does that work? I’ve no idea, but it very much played out like a passing of the torch from Final Girl Sydney Prescott to Sam Carpenter and her sister Tara.

For that reason, I wasn’t too perturbed at the news that Neve Campbell decided not to return for this film – I respect her decision not to accept less pay than she thought she was worth, and in all honesty, Sydney’s story is over. There’s no way to move forward from this point! As Gale says in this movie: “she deserves her happy ending,” and it’s true. Let the woman rest.

But of course, recent events involving the actresses mean that Sam and Tara’s stories are now over as well. And it’s a good enough conclusion for them, though I do regret that we’ll never get to see any follow-up on the real darkness that they tap into when it comes to taking out the killers, to the point where they’re openly revelling in the bloodshed (reminds me a bit of what Arya’s arc coulda/shoulda/woulda been in Game of Thrones – audiences were too busy cheering on her Roaring Rampage of Revenge that they ignored the fact her brutal slaughtering of so many people, however justified, was undoubtedly having horrific consequences on her psyche).

As far as the rest of the movie goes? It’s solid, and very of the moment. There’s a bit more examination of the misogyny that’s often baked into slasher films, a couple of digs at the cops, and a really great use of how conspiracy theories can be used to destroy the lives of innocent people (in this case, online detectives have decided that Sam framed her boyfriend for the previous film’s murder spree).

The meta discussion this time around is to do with franchises, but although Mindy warns that any of the characters could either die or be the killer, the film plays it extremely safe. Mindy gets a fake-out death. Chad gets a fake-out death. Kirby gets a fake-out death. Gale gets a fake-out death. I mean, come on!

The problem is that at this point, killing off some of the characters would be just plain cruel – obviously the Carpenter sisters are safe, and so are Mindy and Chad, since killing off Randy’s nephew and niece would be too cruel to their mother (who had a cameo in the previous movie). Gale was pretty untouchable, especially with Sydney gone and Dewey dead, and it would have been a waste to bring back Kirby after a decade just to kill her off all over again.

This means that the “killing pool” is remarkably small – in fact, this film may well have contained the smallest amount of genuine kills in the whole franchise, comprised of no one that we cared about. It’s a short list of the woman in the cold open, Sam’s therapist, and a handful of extras in the bodega. That’s it! I mean, I wouldn’t have wanted to lose any of the self-titled “core four” or the legacy characters, but it’s definitely an instalment that has cold feet about hurting any of the mains.

But there are some interesting firsts for the franchise. The first time two sets of Ghostfaces are pitted against each other. The first time there are THREE killers working together (I’ve been waiting for that one for a while!) The first time Gale talks to the killer on the phone (and hilariously, tells him to hold please). The first time in what feels like a long time (since Scream 2, if you’re keeping track) that the lead’s boyfriend is a genuinely good guy.

In short, I enjoyed it. They didn’t really lean into the promised depiction of Bystander Syndrome that was frequently mentioned in the interviews leading up to the film’s release, and I was disappointed that Gale went ahead and wrote that book on the last film’s killers when she vowed not to give them any publicity, but on the whole – great time.

Inspector Lynley: Season 2 (2003)

I actually watched most of this a few months ago, but for whatever reason wasn’t able to get to the final episodes until just yesterday. But it was fun to continue with the investigations of Inspector Lynley and Sargeant Havers, even though the characters and their rapport is far more interesting than any of the actual mysteries they solve.

Made up of four stories split into two, making eight episodes altogether, I understand that the show is sticking pretty faithfully to Elizabeth George’s original novels at this point. As such, the mysteries Playing for the Ashes, In the Presence of the Enemy, A Suitable Vengeance and Deception on His Mind are adapted, involving a murdered cricket player, a secret love-child, the fraught web of interpersonal relationships within a Pakistani family, and of course: a mysterious death at an old country estate. What makes that last one most interesting is that it’s Lynley’s estate, and there are some family skeletons that are ready to come out of the closet.

And of course, tons of familiar faces before they were famous, namely Matthew Goode and Sophie Okonedo. Ruth Gemmell and Phyllis Logan are here too, but of most interest to me was Anjali Jay (Djaq from the BBC’s Robin Hood) in what IMDB tells me was her first on-screen role. Damn, she’s so gorgeous and talented, and it’s so unfair that she’s not a bigger star. Perhaps that’s by choice, but we were cheated out of her presence in season three of Robin Hood and I always want to see more of her.

Doctor Who: The Runaway Bride (2006)

I always forget that Donna Noble was introduced on Doctor Who before Martha Jones, right on the heels of Billie Piper leaving the show, and not becoming a companion until a season later. It meant I was a little discombobulated when watching this – her first appearance – and not immediately realizing where on the timeline it fell.

Still, I got there in the end, and obviously I am watching this (and Donna’s season four run) in anticipation of her big return in the current Christmas Specials. I wanted to refresh my memory on what turned out to be one of the show’s most popular companions.

Not that you would have guessed that when she first appeared, which coincides with her wedding day. She’s literally walking down the aisle when she disappears and is transported to the Tardis, where the Doctor is just as baffled as she is. Donna turns out to be a very different kind of passenger: loud, brash and totally unimpressed. She just wants to get to the chapel on time.

But something weird is going on, involving menacing street Santas, a giant star, killer Christmas ornaments, an alien spider – and of course, Donna as Bridezilla. It’s a goofy story, but Russell T. Davies’s tenure was never about plot but characters (basically the inverse of Steven Moffat). It’s in Donna’s rivalry with Nerys, the kids in the back of the car cheering Donna to jump into the Tardis, the little chats that the Doctor gets into with people, even Donna admitting that Lance didn’t deserve his death (though he kinda did). There’s a warmth and humanity here that hasn’t been part of the show for a while now.

As I recall, Donna wasn’t warmly regarded after this episode, to the point where audiences weren’t enthusiastic about Catherine Tate’s return as a permanent companion, but then of course – that’s the entire point of her character. She starts out with a selfish, incurious mind, and then grows over the course of her adventures – though of course, that’s for season four. When we next see her, she’ll be ready to take the Doctor up on his offer to travel with him.

This Special sets up a couple of things that will be used in the next season (the one with Martha) but I’ve decided to skip that one and just focus on Donna’s story in light of her return in the current Specials. She was a favourite companion for a reason and now we’re finally going to get a decent ending for her.

Elementary: Season 2 (2013 – 2014)

Season two of Elementary sees the show settle into itself, though it’s hard to go wrong with straightforward procedurals such as this one. You just need writers smart enough to put together relatively entertaining forty-five-minute mysteries, and then let Miller and Liu’s chemistry do the rest of the work.

Watson is growing into her role as a private investigator, often reaching insights that Sherlock misses (not to mention being able to contribute specialized medical knowledge) while Sherlock is working on a much more difficult project: self-improvement.

If last season was based around the search for Irene Adler/Moriarty, then this one is very much about the relationship between Sherlock and his brother Mycroft, played across the episodes by Rhys Ifans. My feelings were... mixed. It’s a great performance by Ifans, and I liked the rapport between himself and Jonny Lee Miller – though I can’t for the life of me understand why they felt the need to introduce a romantic attraction between Mycroft and Watson.

Not only do Ifans and Liu have negative levels of chemistry, but it throws a deeply awkward and unpleasant spanner in the bond between Watson and Holmes (never date a co-worker’s family member, EVERYONE knows that). The show also tries to string the audience along over whether Mycroft can be trusted or whether he’s just manipulating his brother for nefarious ends, but the whole thing becomes embroiled in so many convoluted revelations that by the time the truth comes out I didn’t particularly care anymore.

Along with the fracture his presence made on the friendship between Holmes and Watson, I ended up relived that he was permanently leaving.

Thankfully, there’s the whole rest of the season to enjoy, with plenty of familiar faces (some of which have become bigger names since their guest-starring roles here). I spotted Cara Buono (Mike and Nancy’s mum on Stranger Things), Danielle Nicolet (Cecile on The Flash), Shiri Appleby (Liz on the original Roswell), William Sadler (another old Roswell alum), Jeremy Jordan (Winn on Supergirl), Scott Cohan (I had a huge crush on Wolf in The 10th Kingdom when I was a teenager), Ted King (Andy on Charmed, who gets one scene here before he’s killed off) and reliable John Peewert as Lestrade, an interesting take on that character which ends up being another recurring role.

There’s also Tim McMullan as the Chief of Police in London (Atticus Pund in Magpie Murders), Heather Burns (the ditzy contestant in Miss Congeniality) and a posthumous return from Roger Rees as Sherlock’s actor friend (the Sheriff of Rottingham, who has since passed on for real). Oh, and Natalie Dormer returns for a single episode as Moriarty.

Whew, there’s always plenty of interesting material in this show – I just need to get a couple of other shows finished before I can carry on with season three.

Disenchantment: Season 5 (2023)

As I’ve said many times before, I’m actually rather astonished that there’s a fifth (and final) season to this show at all. It always seemed to be hanging on by its fingernails, and there was no official announcement that it would return once season four ended. Then after the publicity surrounding the return of Futurama started, I thought that was it – another show prematurely resigned to the dustbin of Netflix, albeit one that made it further than most.

And then – a miracle! The trailer dropped and it turned out we were getting a fifth season after all. Though as ever, I struggled to remember what had happened last time I watched it. Apparently I wasn’t the only one, as the first episode features a man standing at a window and complaining: "it seems like we have to wait a year or more for each new development around here; how can you expect us to even remember what's going ON after such a long delay?" before he’s shot with a flaming arrow. Okay show, message received.

I recalled that Bean escaped her evil mother and evil twin by leaping (or possibly being thrown) from a high castle window, and surviving the fall by landing in the ocean and being rescued by Mora, the beautiful mermaid. Yes, despite some initial ship teasing between her and Elfo, the show commits to an entirely different endgame. Thank God.

From there, it’s a farewell tour around all the locations Bean has visited in past seasons in order to gather her allies and hone her magical skills (she has lightning powers – mmkay) before almost every character picks a side and launches their attack. It’s Princess Bean versus her mother Queen Dagmar, the latter impeccably voiced by Sharon Horgan, who seems to be channelling Joanna Lumley.

Um, the Devil is involved, so are some puppets whose backstories I don’t really understand, along with escapees from a freak show and a multitude of elves. I really should have gone back and watched the whole thing from the start, but the end of the year is approaching fast and I just didn’t have time.

But what do you know, the last episode made me shed a tear. SPOILERS. During the battle for Dreamland Bean is magically tricked into killing Mora, the girl she loves. Heartbroken, she sees no point in going on. Yet during the course of the season, the demon Luci has found himself in Heaven, and after doing God Himself a solid (long story, it involves screwing on a fresh lightbulb) and in return, he’s granted a single wish. And so Luci wishes Mora back to life for Bean’s sake. Why? “Because... I love her.”

All things considered, it was a nice way to say farewell to my Netflix subscription: with an actual ending to a story.