TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 2

The Night of the Return of the Revenge of the Attack of Unresolved Mommy Issues

In season 1 of this show, Wednesday Addams solved a murder mystery and saved her school. At the start of season 2, she deals with her unwanted fame by doubling down on her lone genius act, thus antagonizing the allies she ought to be relying on when a new murderer comes to town. The season concludes by showing Wednesday the consequences of her arrogance and putting her on a path toward repairing her strained relationships.

The execution isn't the most elegant, a problem that the show had since the previous season, but the expanded focus on the supporting cast provides parallels to Wednesday's journey that help the clumsy bits of the plot work more smoothly. Wednesday's roommate Enid has been avoiding her first boyfriend because she's afraid of telling him she fell in love with someone else, an unstable situation that resolves with a serving of karmic irony. Their classmate Bianca has been suffering in silence under the blackmail of the new school director, who is forcing her to use her mind control powers to secure donations; her plight gets predictably worse as she continues to refuse to ask for help. And Wednesday's brother Pugsley has been coping with his loneliness by keeping a zombie as a pet, starting a series of events that come back to threaten his whole family for their unhealthy habit of keeping dirty secrets.

The theme is clear: we can't handle everything on our own, and keeping people in the dark only brings more complications. Wednesday herself is the most significant illustration of this idea. She received a psychic vision that said she would cause the death of Enid, and she keeps this information to herself because she underrates Enid's strength and overrates her own. Through the whole season, Wednesday's biggest flaw is her excessive self-reliance. With Enid, she learns of her mistake by literally walking in her shoes. With her mother, Morticia, it takes the rest of the semester. Wednesday has valid reasons to keep strict boundaries with her meddlesome parents, but when lives are at stake, she should admit that her mother is more versed in the occult arts and that there's a precedent of psychic mishaps in her family tree.

Motherly ties are a central axis of this season. Besides the difficulties between Wednesday and Morticia, the latter also has unfinished business with her own mother. Bianca's predicament revolves around keeping her mother away from the influence of a destructive cult. Tyler, the secondary villain of season 1, kills his substitute mother figure, only to reunite with his actual mother, with whom he has a big final fight after she schemes to (symbolically) emasculate him. Even Pugsley, by virtue of accidentally giving life to a zombie, gets thrown into a motherly role at which he fails repeatedly and catastrophically. And to the extent that a severed hand can experience mommy issues, Thing goes through a small identity crisis arc of its own when its original body reappears to reclaim it.

While the character-focused writing is more solid this time (and one always welcomes more scenes with the radiant goddess that is Catherine Zeta-Jones), the first season's bad habit of overcomplicating the plot comes back with a vengeance. The early episodes build up to what promises to be an important antagonist who soon turns out to be a red (-headed) herring and becomes far less interesting from then on. The mysterious flock of ravens that plague the first half of the season are given an underwhelming explanation before being removed from the picture. The cult that had trapped Bianca's mother makes a last-minute reappearance that feels out of nowhere. In total, we meet no less than six separate characters who at some point seem to be this season's Big Bad Boss. Our young heroes are kept so busy investigating and unmaking this tangle of conspiracies that it's no surprise that, once again, this show that is supposedly set in a school doesn't have scenes where they attend classes or do homework.

Finally, there's the issue with the characterization of the Addams family. The show doesn't know whether it wants to portray the Addams as endearing weirdos or heartless sociopaths, so when they join efforts to save one of their own, it's hard to buy that they truly love each other (at one point Wednesday suspects her family will be threatened, and coldly proposes to sacrifice Pugsley; shortly after, he does fall in real danger, and she forgets her own words and jumps to the rescue). Add to this incongruity the family's volatile way of choosing which deaths to care about, and what we get is a tonally scattershot story that is more interested in the spooky aesthetic than in the consequences of dealing with dark forces on a daily basis. You can either tell a silly absurdist comedy where casual cruelty is hilarious and random murders are background noise in the macabre goofiness that defined the '90s films, or tell a crime drama where people's feelings matter, death is taken seriously and family trauma weighs on the protagonists. Aiming for both is trying to have your ant-infested cake and eat it too.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

 A core theme worth exploring, obscured by lacklustre storytelling and the inability to trust the audience even one tiny bit

Before I get into the meat of this review, I want to talk a little about localisation of books, specifically for the US market. It's not a new topic - authors like Sascha Stronach and Emily Tesh have both publically discussed their experiences of this impacting their own works - but it is a persistent one, and one that absolutely plagues R. F. Kuang's new novel Katabasis.

The novel is set in a university in the UK - Cambridge, specifically - and the main character is a PhD student at the very same. And yet, within the first two paragraphs, I counted six errors in terminology/process for something in such a setting. US and UK academic terminology are bogglingly different, and so I'm used to ignoring the odd few in reading US published books set in non-US settings. It just comes with the territory. But as the first chapter of Katabasis went on, the sheer volume of them was kind of impressive. Nearly every bit of terminology that applies to the academic setting either of the UK or of Cambridge specifically was got wrong*. And it was this consistency that brings me to an assumption - that this is an editorial decision, rather than a set of authorial snafus, especially as I know Kuang has studied in the UK, and her previous academia-centred novel Babel is much, much better on the terminological accuracy front.

If it is editorial localisation... I then have to wonder why? Is there a belief that using non-US terminology will make the book inaccessible to its US market? If so... I would like to hope that's untrue. Coming from the not-US as I do, I know first hand how easily we as a set of reading cultures have adapted to US-specific references. Baffling and nonsensical** as they are, you learn to remember what a sophomore is, what "Greek" means in a university - sorry, college - context, and an array of other tidbits of cultural richness that don't exist elsewhere. Clearly, readers of all sorts are fully willing and capable of adapting to this kind of vocabulary shift (even leaving aside that we're SFF readers who pick up a whole new set of neologisms half the time we read a book). And yet, this kind of USification persists. I assume that publishers know what they're doing and want to make money, so I have to believe based on those priors that there is a benefit to doing all of this, but even so... it frustrates me to no end.

And you might say, what's a bit of terminology among friends? Why does it matter if the person in charge of her PhD is an advisor, not a supervisor, or that she's doing a dissertation instead of a thesis? On the face of it, I would agree, it is a kind of silliness to get all het up about it when the core concepts are still being transmitted and understood, and perhaps even that localising this way means those concepts are better understood by their majority market. But to this I would say - the terminology is just the tip of the iceberg. It's an easy thing to spot. But it signals deeper, more fundamental problems, all of which build to an overarching attitude issue - the need for curiosity and willingness to understand things on their own terms, to see the world as the varied and multiple thing it is, rather than needing it to be condensed into the narrowness of a single understanding.

It says: the world can only be understood through the lens of the USA, and the dominant culture there. Where I might be spotting it in terminology, who's to say there isn't more and deeper in how the work views that world? It certainly comes up in enough works that deal with race outside of the US, because there is a wide gulf in how that topic is tackled in different cultures. Or where works centralise a Christian view of the world. As a process, it stakes a claim to a default from which other things deviate, and that should be a pernicious and discomforting thing to read, no matter where you're from.

And, yes, very simply as someone from outside that default... it rankles. I'm being shown an uncanny valley version of a thing I know so very well, and that's just unpleasant. Not only is it signalling that the things I know about are only worth including when adapted to US understanding (as an aesthetic that can be tweaked, rather than a real place out in the world), but also just that I, as an audience member for this work, am less worthy of consideration than the market it's being adapted to.

Which is a lot to pile onto a bunch of terminological inaccuracies in one book, but it isn't just one book. This is part of a pattern. And when it's a book like this, which has been released with a heap of anticipation and fanfare, it matters all the more. R. F. Kuang's work is the sort of thing the publishers are expecting to rake in the cash, getting the big marketing push all in the run up to release, and so what we see here, I think, very clearly signals what publishing thinks matters, and what will make them money. If that's "make sure a US audience never has to think about things in terms other than the ones they already know"... god help us all.

With that all being said - and inseparable from the work, because the text is not purely a story an author has come up with, but the product of all the decisions that went into creating the final version I get into my hands and brain - let's get onto this as a story object.

Katabasis follows Alice Law, who is (at some point in the late eighties to early nineties***) midway through her PhD in Analytic Magick at the University of Cambridge, under the... direction... of Professor Jacob Grimes, one of the brightest and most controversial lights in the field. Grimes is notable for the excellence of his work, especially the work he did during WW2, but also for the high failure rate of his students, and the intensity of his expectations and approach with them. He is a tyrant, and known for it, but a name that can open doors and make or break careers. More importantly, however, is the fact that he is currently dead. In order to have him open those doors and make that career that Alice so desperately wants, she has to head down to Hell and try to fetch him back. Unfortunately, her fellow student (and academic rival) Peter has had exactly the same idea.

Together, they head into an Underworld not trodden by magicians in the recent past, armed with research of a swathe of texts going back through the academic highlights of centuries all the way past the Ancient Greeks into the Hittites and Egyptians. They must use their knowledge and intelligence to try to navigate the Hell they think they know to find Grimes and bring him back, no matter the cost to them.

Through those reminisces, and their interactions, Kuang attempts to critique the idea of the genius, as well as to undercut the allure of academia by highlighting the physical and mental costs suffered by those trying to enter it, using the magic of the story (which is powered by paradoxes) to highlight the flawed thinking and uncomfortable cognitive dissonance needed to struggle through everything academia, and Grimes as its avatar, throw at them. I say "attempts", because I'm not at all sure the book succeeds either at this, or, perhaps more so, in the necessary twin aim of telling a story that engages you as a narrative object.

To tackle the thematic issues first, there are two complementary issues at work in this book. The first - Kuang seems unable to have any thematic feature of the story that she does not explain in plain, straight up text. There is very little show, no imply, no suggest. Instead, everything is laid out in clear, unambiguous language for the reader. In small doses, this can be fine, and even welcome. It's a tactic that was there plentifully in her previous novel Babel (which I enjoyed). But where in Babel it tended to be relegated to footnotes, here she just whacks it straight into the middle of the text. That alone would shift how it feels, and certainly curtail the stalling effect on the flow of the prose, but where in Babel it overshadowed the earlier part of the text and then receded, here it is omnipresent and obstructively lingering.

Which links in nicely to the second issue - Kuang dwells. On everything. Features of geography, vignettes from a character's past, little nuggets of maths or logic or literature (we'll come back to this) that turn up all over and, indeed, on those thematic explanations. The cumulative effect is of a book that cannot, on any level, let the reader get it themself, whatever "it" might be, which ultimately builds into something patronising and condescending. I found myself muttering "just get on with it" no end of times, because I wasn't getting anything from the lingering. In another book, I might not be so impatient, but that straight up, uncomplicated language for every single thing being spelled out means there's no value in the dwelling; it exists to convey a point, and once the point is conveyed there's nothing of joy to extract. I don't revel in any of the descriptions. The vignettes don't give me a deeper sense of the person. They serve, each, their single purpose and overstay their welcome, continuing on and on through the whole, not particularly short, book.

It feels, on the whole, rather more like a lecture than a story, and a lecture pitched fairly low at that.

While predominantly the reviews of Katabasis and Babel I've seen have been glowing, there is one thread that occurs in common in the negative ones, and it is one I will pick up on too: it feels like Kuang simply does not trust the reader, at any point. We can talk about how justified this may or may not be (and invoke some of the clanger discussions people had about Babel in which they demonstrated that they absolutely did not get it), but I almost think that doesn't matter. This is dark academia - intended to be in the original sense, a book that looks at what academia is and highlights the darkness inherent in it by playing it up. Satire. Caricature. And the problem with both of those approaches to themes is that there will always be someone who misses it. That is just inherent in satire, because of the way it plays with ideas. So if you try to write to avoid that, to make your point so abundantly, simplistically clear that no one could possibly ever miss what you were trying to say... it stops being satirical, because the satire needs the playfulness between ideas, rather than overt explanation. The inability to trust in the reader has cost Kuang the very essence of what she's trying to do.

Which is also a problem that comes up in another of her approaches.

To step back slightly, in the run up to its publication, I saw a number of early readers (predominantly but not exclusively on TikTok) providing reading lists of books one might read to better understand Katabasis. Those lists unsurprisingly contained a fair chunk of Renaissance and Classical literature that touched on the Underworld and journeys there (your Dantes and your Virgils, your primers of Greek mythology), alongside a grab bag of philosophy from Socrates all the way up to the 20th century. I had the slightly unkind thought that some of these readers were doing a speed run recreation of the traditional "western canon". But for all my amusement at the approach, it did make me interested in what Kuang was going to be doing - if those early readers thought reading those texts would bring greater insights into Katabasis, I wondered, how thoughtfully, how interestingly is Kuang engaging with the ideas those texts present.

She's not. I could talk around it, and phrase it more nicely, but she's not. Oh she namedrops them, don't get me wrong. And she cherry picks concepts or motifs from a goodly number. But every single goddamn time, she will explain why that thing matters in plain prose immediately afterwards, to the extent that the text reference itself no longer really serves a purpose except to say "I have read this".

Now, obviously, most of these moments happen in character. It is Alice (and Peter) who are dropping names. Surely, these two characters are doing it because this is the shibboleth they both have, the language they both speak, as people immersed in the study of all these tracts of magic and philosophy and logic and mathematics? These are PhD students! But they don't sound like any PhD student I've ever met. The way they talk about the texts, even the ones that become a little more plot crucial at various points, is horribly surface level, if it even goes that far. They came across to me, more than anything, as insecure first year undergraduates dropping names as a desperate bid to peacock their intellect, and undercut every time one of them - or the narrative - makes everybody pause to check in with the class that they understood what was being discussed and were there any follow up questions?

The whole premise that Kuang is trying to attack rests on - as Alice says, in plain text a number of times - the idea that these students are running a horrible gauntlet for the promise of a prize at the end. That prize might be prestige, or it might be the time and funds to pursue the study that they so desperately crave (Alice falls more into this bucket, though not entirely). As PhD students, Alice and Peter have already run a fair chunk of that gauntlet. They are already immersed in this world, its languages and its pitfalls. They may be more familiar with the darker side of things (oh they are), but they are also the ones who wanted or believed or craved hard enough the allure of the thing at the end. The balance, and the crux of the story, is whether the cost is worth it for that final prize, and indeed whether the prize even exists, or is a rotten, poisoned facsimile of the shining apple it appears to be. But for that to work, you need to sell the dream that these two have bought into. We need to understand what it was they were striving for, why it sold itself to them. At the start of the story, and long before, they both thought the prize was good and worth it, and that they would, in this horrible process, become the knowledgeable, clever, incisive people who could get to it.

By failing to present them as that, by failing to create even a whiff of the alluring intellectual bubble that is the overt sheen of academia that hides the rot underneath that forms the "dark" half of the equation, Kuang fails at the first hurdle. By then cramming her book full of those references, by creating all these lists of names and works, all these famous texts from the traditional (and much critiqued) canon, she's falling into the trap of the very thing she's trying to undercut. Those creators with their reading lists show us that. Read these works, they say, and know the code to Kuang. Except there is nothing to decode. None of it is necessary. You could take out those names, the sassing of Heraclitus**** and the grumbling about Dante, and the text would be the same, because she doesn't effectively use them to craft this semblance of academic glamour in the first place. The thought that kept occurring to me as I read was that this was all surface, and no substance. There are facts and names and works, but none of the connecting tissue necessary to make them all feel valuable as a coherent unit, or to sell us on the very critical idea that Alice and Peter are really very very clever.

Before I seem to be suggesting that this is a failure on every possible point, a pause. There is, under all the not particularly good writing, the core of something... if not quite good then perhaps promising. There are moments when Alice is introspecting, when Alice is examining how much she wants academia and everything she's willing to give up to get it, that approach what dark academia can do well (even if the thing she aims for is never really sold to the reader). There's one moment around half way through, where she describes drunk, giddy, silly grad students being playful with their topic, and that feels right and true, like a moment that could have happened, and would have had the effect it does in the story... but the infrequency of those moments just underscores how flat and un-right the rest of the book feels.There's an essence. But it is no more than that wisp, ephemeral, and lost under the drudge of the story apparatus.

It suggests that, underneath it all, she does get it. Her Alice and that drive for academia. Or perhaps just a very particular sort of person (given how Alice does seem to rhyme quite well with some of the characters in Babel). But getting it isn't enough. You have to make a story out of it, something that works on a sentence by sentence level, on a plot and theme level, that coheres from the granular up to the macro, rather than trading on glamour and the wisps of ideas, and these brief moments of having looked at the world and caught something real as a butterfly in your fingers. It needs to be a story, and it's there it truly fails, far more than any inaccuracy or overexplanation.

Some of that is the plain and overburdened writing I've already mentioned. But there are other key flaws. Despite that core of something true, neither of her primary characters manage to feel interesting and worth following for the majority of the time with them. Alice is introspective, but when that introspection doesn't yield substantial character depth, it just begins to feel self-important rather than worthwhile. And, more to the point, she's just not all that interesting to spend time with. Peter, whom we only see through her eyes, begins as the caricature man from seemingly all of dark academia, who comes from privilege and is easily both attractive and intelligent, and who sails through the academic world with ease in contrast to the heroine's grit and struggle. There are glimmers that he might have something more to him, but those don't resolve until fairly late in the story, and then, because of the way the narrative turns out, his development just gets dropped for a whole section, and only resolved in part by the end. Their chemistry is nearly non-existant. Even their rivalry - which is absolutely critical to the resolution of the story - feels flat and empty.

And when it comes to plotting... it's not so much that Kuang loves a bit of foreshadowing as that she signals with effusive clarity what's coming, unfailingly. There's no tension and no twists. Another victim of that plain and over-explaining style. If it evokes anything, it might be horrible inevitability, but even that implies a management of the story direction that I think might be undeserved. It's just... a sequence of events, with heavy telegraphing of the following steps, such that you must, like her characters, trudge through the wide expanse of grey sand to get to where you want to go (the ending).

Which is... a let down. If you're going to skewer academia, I think you need to do a better job of it than "the power of love" with a bit of vengeance sprinkled on for spicy seasoning.

But maybe the magic system will save it? The translation magic was one of Babel's most interesting points, no? Well... not really. There's actually a lot of similarities in how magic is described in both books. Where for Babel there's a spark that comes in the frisson between words that can't easily be translated, that cognitive texture, in Katabasis, Kuang is playing with the idea of paradox, and has her magicians need to be able to hold conflicting ideas in their head at the same time to essentially put one over on physics. The two ideas aren't the same, but they feel like they approach similar theoretical ground from slightly different angles, and so some of the sheen is worn off the paradox magic. I'll admit, I also just have less time for being walked through formal logic problems than I do for discussions of linguistics. But there's just much less time given over to exploring it as a potentially fascinating idea than perhaps it could have merited. Instead, there's much more lingering on the practicalities, the chalk and the blood and research. Which makes sense in a Watsonian sense, but from a Doylist perspective makes for much drier reading. Once again, there's a possible core of something fascinating here being let down by the connective tissue of storytelling.

And that's my main takes on this book - I just think it's a story told badly, in a number of the key ways in which a story can be told. The prose styling is weak, the plotting unexciting, the tension nonexistent and the characters insufficient to carry the load left for them. All of which then fails to present in a coherent and persuasive way that thematic core. Yes, by the end, she has absolutely conveyed the "academia can really suck and many of the ways in which it sucks are baked into the structures of it". But she's conveyed it by just straight up telling us that. It may work as an idea being passed from author to reader, but it fails at every step on an intuitive level, because she cannot for a moment let it be free of that urge to explain. To tell this story in an emotively effective way, it needed freedom, and showing, and a trust that we could follow into the (frankly not particularly intellectually difficult) territory she was leading us to. A book does not need to be able to be for everyone perfectly and without friction. In removing the friction, she has removed what might have made it a story at all.

Between this, and the fact that none of it was ever allowed to be itself in the first place, but instead translated to be more easily consumable by a specific audience, what's left is something hollow and insubstantial. Both the author and the editorial direction needed to have faith that a reader could do even a tiny amount of work for the story that this was trying to be to work. They both needed to assume anything but the worst and least of their audience. Neither of them did. And so it all falls flat, perpetuating some of the very problems that it theoretically seeks to condemn, and telling the audience in distressingly plain language how little it thinks of them.

--

* The vast majority are indeed switching Cambridge/UK terms for US ones, but a small few are actually switching Cambridge specific ones for Oxford specific ones. Those... I struggle to account for, given the author did a year at both universities. Maybe Oxford just sticks harder in her memory.
**I say this tongue in cheek, but child me did take ages to internalise the freshman/sophomore/junior/senior thing.
*** This isn't specified, but can be dated via events referenced in the text. I suspect the events of the story are taking place in 1991, but it could go a year or two either way.
**** She is very briefly very dismissive of him, because like many of the pre-Socratic philosophers he presents some ideas which, now, look absolutely batshit. But what she fails to mention in her mockery of him is that he, and the other pre-Socratics, were working from first principles to try to understand the universe, and they paved the way for the more accessible later works like Aristotle. Shoulders of giants and all that. No Heraclitus sass here.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10

Reference: R. F. Kuang, Katabasis [HarperVoyager, 2025].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 1

Clever, funny, horror mayhem and lots of family drama

After a bold and successful first season, Wednesday has returned to Netflix with a suitably creepy new adventure. For those unfamiliar with the series, Wednesday is the latest iteration of The Addams Family, the creepy, wealthy, cynical, and humorously ghoulish family that evolved from classic New Yorker cartoons to a 1960s sitcom, to numerous feature films, and now to a daughter-focused, light-horror, Netflix series. In season one, teen daughter Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) is sent to Nevermore Academy after her defiantly macabre behavior gets her in trouble elsewhere. Nevermore is an isolated academy for “outcasts” who, in this setting, are teens with supernatural identities such as werewolves, sirens, gorgons, vampires, witches, etc. Cynical, dour Wednesday must adjust to life on the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired campus while reluctantly accepting the friendship of her sunshiny roommate Enid (Emma Myers), and solving the mystery of a serial killer who is deceptively hiding in plain sight in the town. She approaches the challenge with her signature combination of intelligence, clairvoyance, and fearlessness.

In season two (part one), Wednesday overuses her clairvoyance and begins to suffer physical consequences including crying or bleeding black tears and becoming exhausted and passing out. Meanwhile, as she returns to school at Nevermore, she is irritated to discover that she is now a beloved celebrity on campus. But, there is a new mysterious killer in town, assassinating people via a swarm (murder) of crows and also overtly stalking Wednesday. When Wednesday has a vision of Enid’s death, she becomes determined to use her clairvoyance to find the killer and save Enid. This puts her at odds with her mother Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who is openly worried about Wednesday succumbing to the same obsession, psychosis, and physical harm that Morticia’s sister Ophelia suffered. As a side story, Wednesday’s younger brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) enrolls at the school and accidently creates a murderous zombie from a long dead Nevermore student. With multiple killers, stalkers, and high stakes crises, Wednesday quickly moves towards a mid-season climax in which yet another killer joins the chaos.

Season one was a funny, clever, horror mystery with lots of red herrings and lots of adventure. However, season two intensifies the emotional investment of the characters. Instead of directly rehashing the same type of plot, season two builds on certain elements of the first season but takes the storytelling in a more character focused direction. A major driving force of the current season is Wednesday’s friendship with Enid. Instead of Enid being a comedic foil or general annoyance to her, Wednesday’s determination to protect Enid emphasizes Wednesday’s emotional evolution in the midst of the mayhem and cynicism. Conversely, in season two, Wednesday has a degenerating antagonistic relationship with her mother, even as Morticia struggles with anger at her own mother. The multi-level mother-daughter conflicts, and the mutual insecurities that fuel them, is a secondary driving force of the story. Despite these meaningful emotional overtones, the show still has plenty of action as Wednesday deals with a primary murderous stalker, as well as a creepy fangirl stalker (a show-stealing Evie Templeton) and the fallout of her little brother’s accidental zombie creation.

While the core adventure and emotional overtones are solid, the show sometimes suffers from an overabundance of side plots which can, at times, be distracting and does periodically slow the pacing of the primary story. In addition to the main storyline, we also have Pugsley’s rampaging zombie, Enid’s love triangle with Ajax (Georgie Farmer) and Bruno (Noah B. Taylor), a newly arrived music teacher (Billie Piper), and a mysterious psychiatrist (Thandie Newton) at the town’s high security psychiatric hospital. There is also a bit of social commentary regarding the way Bianca (Joy Sunday) is manipulated by the new Nevermore headmaster (Steve Buscemi) who uses her status as a scholarship recipient to exploit her for financial gain. And we have Bianca’s issues with protecting and hiding her mother. Most of the stories are entertaining, albeit voluminous, with the possible exception of Pugsley’s zombie, which is often a bit campy despite being a poignant representation of Pugsley’s relatable feelings of awkwardness and isolation as he begins the new school.

Despite being a teen adventure, Wednesday is also a horror comedy series, which means several characters meet their demise onscreen in horror film ways. Fortunately, the actual gore is kept to a PG safe minimum. This balance of intensity makes the show a satisfying and entertaining gothic adventure without becoming overly graphic. Overall, the first half of Wednesday Season 2 is off to a promising, albeit overstuffed, start with solid acting and entertaining plotting as things move from bad to worse for Wednesday.

Highlights:

• Escalating emotions
• Lots of subplots
• Clever, funny, horror adventure

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

TV Review: Bet

A live-action version of the quirky anime

Gambling as a passion, an addiction, or as a means to an end is the theme for the new Netflix series Bet. Bet is a live-action version of the quirky anime Kakegurui, a story of an elite private school where intense gambling is encouraged and the results are dangerous and cruel. However, new arrival Yumeko is serenely and eerily comfortable with the wild atmosphere. She fearlessly engages with the most sadistic opponents while building a bewildered crew of friends who try to avoid becoming collateral damage. The original show is a psychological thriller—creepily intense and substantially deranged. The live-action adaptation has a similar vibe, especially initially, but eventually evolves into a traditional Mean Girls-style teen drama.

In Bet, Yumeko (Miku Martineau) is a new student at St. Dominic’s, an elite private school where wealthy families send their children to learn cutthroat leadership skills via nonstop gambling. Yumeko’s sweet and seemingly friendly nature stands out in sharp contrast to the other cynical students, who range from terrified or cautious to lethal and cruel. But beneath her charming exterior, Yumeko is also a fearless and consummate gambler. At St. Dominic’s the top winners financially earn a spot on the manipulative student council, while those with the highest losses and debts become degraded servants known as “house pets.” Shortly after arriving, Yumeko gains an ally in Ryan—Ryoko in the anime (Ayo Solanke), a house pet she is kind to and for whom she uses her gambling winnings to free from his bondage to the cynical and cruel Mary (Eve Edwards), who also becomes a reluctant ally and frenemy. However, in Bet, unlike the anime, Yumeko is more than a gambling addict: she is driven by revenge. Despite her talents, she is opposed by the colorful characters on the student council, including violent Dori (Aviva Mongillo), dramatic Suki (Ryan Sutherland), self-absorbed Chad (Dorian Giordano), mysterious Riri (Anwen O’Driscoll), and her sister, the dictatorial Kira (Clara Alexandrova), the president of the council. In her quest for revenge, Yumeko secretly enlists the help of a loner classmate, Michael (Hunter Cardinal), much to the dismay of the now lovesick Ryan. Michael becomes a confidant in Yumeko’s true strategy, even as his own motivations remain unclear.

Unfortunately, the story takes a turn, moving from a quirky, engaging character study to a straightforward assassination plot that feels strangely superficial and decidedly juvenile. As the series progresses, the plot requires a willing suspension of disbelief as the story drifts towards hijinks rather than more abstract psychological intrigue.

Recreating an anime for live action is always a challenge due to pressures of fan expectations, the difficulty of creating believable visuals in a real-life setting, and the challenges of executing an appropriate acting style. Bet does a nice job of capturing the essence of the original lead characters, including the confident and mysterious Yumeko, insecure but loyal Ryan (Ryoko in the anime), and cynical and pragmatic Mary. Miku Martineau’s Yumeko is particularly appealing with her thoughtful portrayal of a consummate manipulator. However, although the premise of Bet remains the same as Kakegurui, the plot has some significant changes. Michael is a new character who adds additional complications to the story. Yumeko is addicted to the rush and danger of gambling, but in Bet, she uses gambling as a specific tool for revenge for the murder of someone she loves. Having this new layer of motivation would normally be a great way to create more emotional investment and suspense, but the execution would have been better served by leaning into the subtlety and psychological thriller elements of the source material. Instead, the live-action version descends into direct and less suspenseful assassination attempts. The initial edginess of the show’s adult language and sexual inuendo is eventually undercut by the PG nature of the crimes that occur. Additionally, Kakegurui uses fantastical effects to explore the inner workings of the characters’ thoughts and their intensely passionate responses to risk. In Bet, this visual technique is mostly omitted, so the fantastical elements of the story are primarily displayed through the unusual character visuals.

Despite these changes, Bet is still a better adaptation of Kakegurui than prior versions. The acting and creative casting of Bet makes the series reasonably enjoyable. However, fans of Kakegurui will likely be disappointed by the shift from the edgy, disturbed, magical realism elements of the anime. Instead, we have an interesting premise that ultimately abandons psychological terror in favor of a more direct and traditional murder. By playing it safer with the writing, Bet ironically avoids the risk of telling an unusual story in an unusual way.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Creepy academic setting
• Disappointing stylistic shift midseason
• Engaging characters

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Book Review: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

 A very British, very brutal take on dark academia that takes it back to its more critical roots.

Caveat: this review was written in October 2024, and I believe before the final editing pass. I doubt it will make an actual difference to anything, but just in case.

So… dark academia. Where to start with it? At the beginning, I suppose.

I haven’t read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History in a good number of years now, but I remember loving it. It’s dark in the truest sense, complex, vicious and incredibly cutting about institutions, class, power and hierarchy. This is dark academia as a tool for critiquing the setting, although, as with all satire, there were inevitably people who missed the point, even when it came out.

Cards on the table – I went to the University of Cambridge, where I studied classics. My background was not wealthy, though I had some advantages that helped me on the route to university, but there was enough in the perspective of The Secret History’s protagonist that felt real and personal to me, that I was always either going to love or loathe it. For all that my university experience was pretty positive, there was enough in what I saw that connected to what Tartt discusses, what she critiques, that the book made a special little place in my heart right from the off. If this is where dark academia had stayed, this thoughtful place that understood and heavily satirised the trappings of power, privilege and education, and what they mean for the lives of the people in the system, what they mean for aspirations, and how class is so deeply interwoven through all of it, it would have been a damn good subgenre.

Alas, much of modern dark academia feels more about style than substance – it’s the allure of the tweed jacket and the terrible teens swapping Shakespeare quotes because they’re just better than everyone else, and the feeling of being part of that crowd because you, the reader, by dint of reading this sort of book, are also better than everyone else, and part of this special intellectual club. The extent to which the point is being missed is frankly astounding.

The new novel from Emily Tesh, The Incandescent, is also billed as dark academia in much of the marketing, but where many of the more recent entries have strayed from its origins, here, Tesh has dug both hands deep into the thorniest parts of what Tartt was getting at and yanked. The Secret History is a fundamentally American story, and this… this is a deeply, deeply English one. It is so utterly suffused with English notions of class, education, history and legacy, I almost wonder how some of it made it through the US editors. This is a story that includes a specific song sung at the University of Cambridge about how we’d rather go to Oxford, our longstanding historical nemesis, than one of the colleges of Cambridge, St. John’s*. Why John’s is loathed is a matter long lost in the annals of history, but knowing the song is one of the many shibboleths of Oxbridge culture, another way of saying “here I am, I know the secret knowledge, I am one of us”. Wait… I swear we were just talking about exactly that…

Set in a posh English boarding school that offers, among the usual curriculum, lessons in the three modern branches of magic, The Incandescent follows the long-suffering Dr. Walden, director of magic, deputy head, and person responsible for much of the smooth running of the school. Walden, alumna of the school, Oxford graduate, PhD and one of the best magicians of her age, is a complex figure with her roots deep into the various education systems of England and beyond. She’s well placed to charm and soothe the wealthy parents of her privileged pupils, as well as to advocate for those few whose places at the school are charity rather than spending, those whose magic is so strong they have to be somewhere where they can be trained into safety.

Already, we have a point of difference – where many of the novels in dark academia follow the young, teenagers, university students, Walden is 37, jaded and somewhat tired. She looks on her young charges with a great deal of fondness, but also a healthy dose of exasperation – she does not take teenagehood and its tribulations as seriously as teens do, because she’s been there, done that, and seen a number of years of them come up under her tuition. This is academia with an already weathered eye, an awareness that none of it is truly that special, all things come around again and again.

Particularly, what comes around again here is a longstanding threat to the school from a demon that lives just on the other side of the borderline of reality, known affectionately as Old Faithful. Incursions have happened throughout the years, with disastrous consequences, and things seem poised for another one under Walden’s watchful gazy. That alone might be the story of some novels – a looming threat, a skilled guardian with the right companions, putting down the big bad once and for all. But Tesh takes it in a rather different direction – the enemy here is a subtler one, and the true problems the characters face do not fully realise until much later on.

If you’ve read Some Desperate Glory, her Hugo winning novel, you’ll know Tesh isn’t averse to changing the rules of the game late on. The effect here is rather subtler, but has some markings of the same hand at work in it – we learn enough about the system, the parameters of the story to start to feel comfortable, and then we learn that actually, we’ve been focussing on the wrong things entirely. Time to pivot and reassess our view, and re-examine the knowledge the book has given us.

That moment, that pivot, is key to the success of both books. Though they focus on rather different issues at play, both are stories that want the reader to really interrogate the systems at work in their worlds, and do so by forcing them out of complacency. They let you think you know what this is, that you know the rules, and then boom, no you don’t. In that moment of uncertainty, you have to think about what the story’s doing. You are forced to do the work, and to look under the rug at what might be lurking, unexamined.

The answer, in The Incadescent, is a complex cocktail of privilege and class, a dash of very British racism, and the long, rotten tail of tradition and legacy that seems like an unavoidable mould upon educational institutions. It’s there right from the start, but it’s only once the story lurches that you truly confront it in all its nastiness.

And, following on from that, I felt likewise drawn into an interrogation of both the dark academia novel and its longstanding cousin, the school story. Before Harry Potter seized the cultural attention, there were plenty of others, including plenty of magical ones – I have fond memories of watching The Worst Witch, and though I never read the books, there were many who did. They too are full of children who are in some way Special. Sometimes they are special because of their magic, but many of them are also from longstanding families, wealthy, with societal cache and legacies running deep into the past, alumnae of the institutions that the current crop of children attend. Draco Malfoy and Ron Weasley were not innovations, and owe their debts to many a character before them.

It is easy, especially as a child, not to look too closely at this idea of specialness, of this small, select, often secret group of people, being taught things normal people aren’t allowed to or cannot know. The idea that they’re better always floats just below the surface.

Tesh confronts that. The story examines the rot in the system, while acknowledging the good – there’s always something good or wanted in there, at least for someone, else the system never would have ended up perpetuated – and forcing the reader to confront all the nasty foundations upon which these stories are built. Here, the privilege is obvious – that this is a posh boarding school, with all the attendant issues, is front and centre, returned to again and again. You cannot forget it, nor can you forget the position that puts some of the students in.

On the one hand, you have a ward of the school, a magical prodigy, whose talents likely caused the death of her parents at a young age. Black, not well-off and alone in the world. The school, the lessons to help her control the magic that brought her to the attention of the authorities, are her world, but she is a step apart from so many of her fellows. She knows this – it’s acknowledged in conversations with Walden, her hesitance about her place in the world going forwards.

And then in contrast, a legacy boy. He has talent, yes, but also charm, and both make him lazy. He is someone for whom the world lines itself up nicely, smooths the path, whether because of money, connections, or simply the confidence of coming from that sort of background. Critically, his charm is palpable to the reader. Walden doesn’t hate him – though she acknowledges as an adult she might find him insufferable (we’ll come back to this in a moment) – and I found I never could. He genuinely is charming, as many people in his sort of situation are. The contrast between these two, as well as their interplay with their teachers, the school,  and their classmates is a well balanced look at how education systems perpetuate the existing inequalities of English society, locking into place the old class and money hierarchies that stretch back deep into history.

I say English, not British, because I think a lot of what this book does is rooted in a particularly English sort of superiority complex. Which isn’t to say equivalents or similar versions aren’t available across the UK, but just that the one this particularly focuses on is a particularly subset of the type.

But it’s not all about the kids. Because we have Walden as our main viewpoint character, we have access to a world within the school outside of the sphere of interest and influence of the children. This is a book about teaching, about the various structures around keeping a school of this sort going, as much as it is about all the rest. But it also means we have access to adult relationships. While not dispassionate ones, there’s something so much more alluring about the interpersonal stuff – romantic and otherwise – of a 37 year old than the high drama ones more likely in books with teenage protagonists. 37 year olds just do relationships differently to teens. The priorities, the focus, the modes of interaction are just a whole other thing.

This, too, is something the book does fantastically. We see Walden interacting with various members of staff – we get her friendships, her rivalries, her flirtations, and indeed her romances. We see her as a whole, rounded person, someone who had a life before the story began, with people in it. Where teens can feel a fresh slate, ready to make the relationships that will kickstart them into the world, Walden is someone with failures behind her, someone who has loved, lost and learned. It makes her jaded, but it also makes her so, so interesting to read, and so very human.

She also has relatably tragic taste in men (and very acceptable taste in women).

Good bi rep in a non-romance book is a rare and wondrous thing. Good bi rep that acknowledges compulsory heterosexuality and that bi women can be totally ok with being attracted to men, and not just diet lesbians with bad habits? Chef’s kiss.

Because, coming back to the charming boy – there is an adult version of him in the story. He is bad news. Walden knows he’s terrible. But he is, also… well, he’s charming. He’s charming in a way that is so palpable on the page. I got it. I didn’t blame her. And while this is great for bi rep in general, it swings us right back to those points about privilege and power and charm. This is what the adult product of that upbringing looks like. He moves so easily through the world, and some of us even like him, while knowing what he is, where he’s come from.

Dark academia works because there is an undeniable allure to some of what those broken systems create. Not for everyone, of course. Some people will inevitably see right through the charming man and send him on his way. But some people will… I don’t want to say “fall for it”, because you can do it with eyes open too. You can see the smiling face of all that corruption and kiss it anyway, knowing what’s underneath, because it is a good smile, and it is a remarkably good kisser and well… it’s just a kiss, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s only… it’s just…

And so the system has you too.

Tesh’s characters here are never just characters. They are so totally embedded in their places in the world, that every interaction is laden down with meaning. The hot man is never just a cigar.

When I stop to think about this book, I inevitably circle back, again and again, to class. People joke that British people see the whole world through its lens, and at least speaking for myself, I cannot deny it. And as an SFF reader in the current environment, where so much is dominated by US-authored stories, it’s not something I see in fiction as much or in the same way as I experience it in the world around me. It makes me hungry for stories that acknowledge this scaffolding that sits around a large part of my worldview. It sometimes exasperates me when stories don’t recognise it, especially stories set in the UK, or places that feel like the UK, or when they fail to convey its nuances. It isn’t the only lens – gender, race and sexuality too have their parts to play – but to cut it out of the story fails to capture the world. So when we come to a genre like dark academia, one so steeped in all the trappings that for me, an English person, are laced with class markers… to have it missing? That’s half the story untold.

Tesh does not leave that half untold. It is there, written large, in every word on every page. This is a story that understands how class is the underpinning, the bedrock, upon which these sorts of institutions thrive and survive. Money is important, but class is everything. Even the people who think they know better cannot escape it.

And it is precisely that awareness, and the very evident flawed immersion in exactly that environment, that makes the protagonist and the story work so, so well. If The Incandescent is dark academia, it is an entry into the genre that knows its roots, and chooses to take that original sense of knowing critique, of the view of the rot that you can only get from right in the very innards of the beast. It acknowledges the allure, the good, the draws – Walden, whatever else she is, is a dedicated, passionate educator committed to her students and the subject she teaches them, and one who loves the place she first came to her passion – it understands why we would kiss the charming man. But it tells us, in the end, that the rot is there under the smile, and that it cannot be ignored.

* Sung to the tune of “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain”, it runs thus:

“Oh I’d rather be at Oxford than St. John’s.
Oh I’d rather be at Oxford than St. John’s.
Oh I’d rather be at Oxford, rather be at Oxford, rather be at Oxford than St. John’s”.
Truly, an artwork for the ages.

--

The Math

Highlights: a very British criticism of class, dark academia with teeth and claws intact, top tier bi rep

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Emily Tesh, The Incandescent, [Tordotcom, 2025].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Review: The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, by H. G. Parry

 A familiar remix of familiar ideas, with not quite enough of anything fresh or novel

I follow a lot of writers on social media, and one particular message that they often promulgate goes something like this:

Don’t be afraid to do something that’s been done before. Tropes are tools, not poison! Even if [other writer] did it first, YOU haven’t done it yet! The fact that it’s YOURS is all we need to make it special and new. Give us YOUR take on [trope]. Every new voice is valuable.

I’ve always enjoyed this perspective. It’s so fundamentally encouraging to shy new writers, an open-armed invitation to join a club, not to self-reject one’s work just because it doesn’t feel fresh. New voices are always fresh, even if they are offering familiar old stories. (If nothing else, the endless parade of retellings of myths and fairy tales is evidence enough of SFF’s (excessively?) high tolerance for familiarity.)

The problem is that, sometimes, even a new voice telling an old story is not enough to make that story fresh. And such was the impression I got from The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door. The scholar in question is one Clover Hill, a young woman who has grown up on a farm in northern England in the early 20th century, and had her life reasonably well planned out, in unthreatening but not terribly exciting detail. Then WWI hits, and her brother comes back from the front lines terribly damaged—not, as so many young men were, by the shells and the gas and the guns and bayonets, but because there was a supernatural element to the carnage. As Clover learns from her brother's comrade who brings him home, our world is overlaid with a world of magic, hidden but mighty, governed by old families who derive their power from intricate deals struck with the world of faerie next door.

One such magic-user was on the front lines of the fighting, and in all the carnage summoned a faerie. Something went wrong: the faerie was not contained, and a hideous curse struck down as many or more soldiers as any human-made weapon. Clover’s brother is unusual only because he mostly survived. But only mostly; he is not well, and he will not recover without help. So through perseverance and connections Clover manages to force her way into a spot at the school where all magic-users are trained, determined to learn the skills she needs to save her brother.

The  problem, though, is that the world of magic-dom was spooked by this catastrophic release of uncontrolled faerie magic, and so the teaching of faerie magic has been banned. All doors to faerie are closed and locked. Clover has no hope of learning to save her brother, unless she can find her own way to an open faerie door—which, if you’ve paid attention to the title of the book, is not an impossible task.

If you’ve spent much time reading fantasy books in the last 20 years, you’ll recognize a lot of these elements. A non-magical outsider goes to magic school where she must fight for a place among an entrenched magical aristocracy who don’t want her there. Harry Potter, anyone? Babel?  She finds a home and a core cohort of friends (The Secret History), but learns that there are dark secrets and hidden evils, and to save what she loves, she must destroy it (Scholomance). There’s even a tree that beats up people who get too close to the restricted section of the library. There is a Whomping Willow, for dog’s sake. The faeries, too, with their binding bargains peppered with dangerous loopholes, whose otherworldly weirdness is beyond human comprehension, give a lot of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell vibes, mixed with Lords and Ladies by Sir Terry Pratchett, or Lud in the Mist by Hope Mirrlees.

And, in principle, I’d be all over this. I’ve written before how I love me some faerie bargains. And this particular trope is freshened by being intertwined with another trope, in which faerie land becomes a metaphor for colonisation (hello, Under The Pendulum Sun!). Unfortunately, ‘Colonialism Bad Actually’ is a very low-hanging bit of low-hanging fruit to signal who the baddies are in your story—especially if those baddies in question have already been signalled to be baddies by being wildly misogynistic (snoooore).

And furthermore, using colonialism for faeries strikes me as problematic. One element that makes faeries (in general) work really well (for me) is their inhuman blue-and-orange morality. The idea that there are these sentient creatures whose values and morals are so wildly askew from human understandings of virtue is really, really compelling in fantasy storytelling. But if these creatures are also metaphorically equated with colonised people, we’re left with a deeply unfortunate implication that colonised people are inhuman and incomprehensible. To be fair, perhaps Parry picked up on this, because she eventually gives the faerie antagonists an entirely humanly comprehensible motivation for their actions, but in doing that, she betrays the blue-and-orange morality that makes faeries so compelling as a plot device in the first place. So we’re left with the worst of both worlds: colonised people are still incomprehensibly inhuman and other, and they don’t even have a satisfyingly weird value system.

The plot itself is fine. The pacing is good, and Parry decides to do a time-jump in the middle, rather than use the structural device of back-and-forth intertwining timelines, which I appreciated. Mixing timelines has always been rather frustrating to me, since one is always less interesting than the other. I find the secondary characters quite well drawn, too, with compelling motivations, and the development and collapse of that sparkling cohort of best friends in school felt very real. I had one group of friends in high school that I’ve fallen out of touch with; and another in college who I likewise haven’t spoken to in decades. The collapse of these close-knit bonds that feel unbreakable in youth, and the awkward groping back together after a decade of separation, landed very precisely in my feels, exactly as Parry intended. But for all that, the plot itself didn’t feel very exciting. There are some developments that could have led to very fun twists, and didn’t; and Clover’s angst about her desire to pursue this new life among the patriarchal upper-class colonisers felt forced and in places inconsistent. And I’d already seen the same thing done much more effectively in Babel.

I guess that’s the thing. This book had a lot of familiar elements in it, but the way they were combined didn’t make them into anything fresh or new. It was not more than the sum of its parts. It was exactly the sum of its parts—and each of its parts could also be found doing its bit more effectively in a different book. If you want faeries, (re)read Susanna Clarke and Terry Pratchett; if you want dark academia, (re)read Donna Tartt; or go for R. F. Kuang if you want it mixed with magic and colonialism. And if you want to read something by H. G. Parry that is genuinely fresh and novel, allow me to recommend The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep.

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Faerie bargains

• Secret magic school

• Colonialism is Bad, Actually

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

References:

Clarke, Susanna. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell [Tor 2006].

Kuang, R. F. Babel [Harper Voyager, 2022].

Mirrlees, Hope. Lud in the Mist [Knopf, 1927/Orien Publishing Co, 2018].

Ng, Jeanette. Under the Pendulum Sun [Angry Robot, 2017].

Novik, Naomi. A Deadly Education [Scholomance 1] [Del Ray, 2020].

Novik, Naomi. The Last Graduate [Scholomance 2] [Del Ray, 2021].

Novik, Naomi. The Golden Enclaves [Scholomance 3] [Del Ray, 2022].

Parry, H. G. The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door [Orbit, 2024].

Parry, H. G. The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep [Orbit, 2019].

Pratchett, Terry. Lords and Ladies [Harper Collins, 1992 / Harper 2013].

Tartt, Donna. The Secret History [Knopf, 1992].

Book Review: Dark City Rising by C. L. Jarvis

 A promising vision, thwarted by an attempt to maintain strict historical accuracy

Dark City Rising is a story that piles up all my catnip features high and deep: Dark Academia, 18th century Glasgow and Edinburgh, the Scottish Enlightenment, hidden magical libraries, secret societies, and plucky medical professors fight back by reading minds and shooting fire from their hands.

It sounds absolutely amazing, right? It should have been! All the pieces were there. But alas, it was not—and I think it struggled in large part because of the earnest, rigorous research into the historical underpinnings of the characters and philosophies that scaffolded the story.

The plot is as follows: William Cullen, a professor at Glasgow University, is secretly exploring a new field of study: the use of phlogiston to manipulate matter. He takes under his wing young Joseph Black, a medical student, and together they start making substantial advances in their joint studies. However, Cullen is a bit of an iconoclast: He is an atheist, and he rejects the teachings of Herman Boerhaave, the ‘father of physiology’, under whom all the best medical men (except Cullen) have done their training. So Cullen is locked out of the very best positions, at the University of Edinburgh, and young Joseph Black eventually succumbs to family pressure and transfers to Edinburgh to finish his training.

At Edinburgh, Black discovers that the university is largely governed by a secret society, called the Dark Chymists, who employ sigil-based magic and wield vast powers in the city. Yet those powers aren’t quite enough to allow them to win their ongoing a power struggle with the Edinburgh town council to determine control of the college of medicine at the University of Edinburgh. They are very anti-Cullen, and engage in some recreational murder whenever anyone starts suggesting that Cullen might be a good addition to Edinburgh’s faculty. Young Joseph Black, as Cullen’s student, has to balance his loyalty to his old mentor with the need to keep the Dark Chymists happy if he wants to progress in his career at Edinburgh, but things get tricky as the body count mounts.

Given this set-up, it seems like the shape of an excellent plot might be in order. Glasgow vs. Edinburgh, phlogisten vs. sigils, town vs. gown, Cullen vs Dark Chymists, religion vs. science---so many dichotomous tensions are put into play in ways that echo each other very promisingly.

Unfortunately, none of this promise is realized effectively. First, there’s the order of in which information is presented to the reader, which withholds critical details early, and only provides them long after a confused reader has stumblingly inferred the shape of things from context. For example, the exact status of the Dark Chymists, and their power play with the town council, needed to be laid out much earlier. They are the primary antagonist to Cullen’s ambitions, they have their fingers in every decision taken by Edinburgh University. Vast amounts of academic intrigue and politicking are informed by their agenda. But throughout the first half of the book, they lurk with a vague kind of menace, which, while atmospheric, is not enough to justify their role. In Chapter 28 I was writing peevish marginal notes complaining about the lack of detail; in Chapter 32 the notes got even more peevish, and by the time we learn about the shape of the power struggle between the chymists and the town council, in Chapter 45, when a very short bit of exposition reveals all, my notes are fuming about how this was a couple of hundred pages too late to be useful. Even now, after having finished the book, I can’t figure out why the Dark Chymists are so anti-Cullen to begin with, since he keeps his phlogiston studies secret for most of the book.

The role of women in the book is also irritatingly tokenistic in a way that I would not have expected from such a modern book. Cullen’s wife is one of two female characters with any role to play. That role is to help Cullen investigate a mysterious assassin by cultivating a relationship with the assassin’s wife. The fact that I can’t even describe these women’s importance to the plot without situating them in terms of their husbands is the first problem; and the second is that none of this subplot ends up being relevant to anything. It feels infuriatingly as if Jarvis was aware of the lack of women as her book took shape, and tried to shoehorn some in, without having any idea how to integrate them properly into the main plot. The result is so unsatisfactory that it draws attention to the pointlessness of this feeble gesture, to worse effect than if the women had been absent entirely.

Of course, the reason this story was so hard to integrate women into is that it is based entirely on real people, and records of the power struggles between professors in the medical colleges of Glasgow and Edinburgh university lean pretty dude-heavy. William Cullen was a real man; Joseph Black was a real man (indeed, there is a building at the University of Glasgow named for him); various characters in Edinburgh—Rutherford, Monro, and others—they were all real people. And becaues they were all real people, Jarvis took excruciating care to fit the events of the book into the historical shape of their real careers. But people’s careers do not follow neat paths.  Black and Cullen and Rutherford and Monro did not have Jarvis’s plot needs in place when they applied for a position in chemistry or decided to change institutions. They were just living their lives, criss-crossing up and down the Central Belt of Scotland: Cullen starts at Glasgow, where he teaches Joseph Black, who then moves to Edinburgh, where he gets his first job, before moving back to Glasgow, crossing paths with Cullen, who is making a move to Edinburgh for himself now. By forcing the book's plot to reflect these decisions, we end up with a kind of sprawling, awkward game of musical chairs, in which decisions and motivations don’t make much sense. At one point there was a historical gap of about 10 years between two events that Jarvis uses in the plot, and so for the space of those 10 years the Dark Chymists just . . . go away. I have never before seen a better argument supporting the tendency of authors of historical fiction to fiddle around with timelines of events than this book, in which Jarvis didn’t.

So, in sum, we’re left with an unsatisfying realization of a brilliant, imaginative vision. I would love to read the book that Jarvis’s ideas could have produced. But this book is not that.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Excessive faithfulness to historical timelines
• Unrealized promise of a brilliant Dark Academia premise
• Infuriatingly tokenistic women

Nerd coefficient: 5/10 problematic, but has redeeming qualities

Reference: Jarvis, C. L. Dark City Rising [Pewter Lynx Press, 2024].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative

Novella review: 8:59:29 by Polly Schattel

Academia is hell—literally!

When I finished my last undergraduate final, I walked out of the room wanting to never take another test again, and so far I have kept to that vow. I have many friends, however, who went on to graduate school, and I try to understand the ordeal they have gone through; Bret Devereaux’s blog paints a bleak picture that makes me feel like I dodged a bullet. The widespread adjunctification of higher learning, combined with the slow transformation of secondary and increasingly primary education into college-oriented pressure cookers, must have been contributing factors to the rise of dark academia stories, where fantastic horrors are added to the real horrors of the academy. Here, Polly Schattel has made an odd but engrossing addition to this subgenre, 8:59:29.

The numbers that comprise the rather odd title are terms from filmmaking; this is quite appropriate, given that our protagonist is an adjunct professor of film at a university in the Appalachians that is clearly having funding woes and has seen better days. Her life is miserable; she lives in poverty with a department head who hates her, and her students don’t care about the material at all. Only one does: a local dropout who audits the class until he is forced out by the aforementioned department head. Out of anger, the two conspire to send him to hell.

Yes, that’s right. They find a demonic ritual on the dark web and start to plot not only his demise but his damnation. In this regard, this slim volume is a modern reimagining of the archetypical deal with the devil, adapted with great skill to modern conditions. It’s clear that Schattel has lived these conditions; this college is in what is clearly a dying town, ravaged by neoliberalism and outsourcing, and with no real sense that it has any sort of future worth sticking around for.

Stories of deals with the devil all revolve around, on some level, fervent hope that one’s circumstances could improve, a hope that rapidly spirals into desperation (K. J. Parker’s novella The Devil You Know is another take on it I liked). They’re about the desperation that leads people to fall for Nigerian prince scams, or get roped into multi-level marketing, or swear that essential oils will cure all their ills. It’s the rage of feeling that your future has been snapped out from under you, like being expelled from the course you’re auditing against the professor’s will. The professor once saw herself being successful, but has long since given up on it; the student sees glory in his grasp. When the future is stolen, they will go through hell to get it back.

There’s a grottiness here, not of the swampy fantasy inn, but of the all-too-real rust belt that soaks through every scene. The apartments are grungy and the souls of their inhabitants feel like they’ve rusted along with the factories. These feel like people who would make a literal deal with a demon just to feel something.

Befitting a horror story, it’s properly scary. The demons and the other accoutrements of hell are properly grotesque or otherwise eerie, with enough disturbing images to haunt your dreams for at least the next few days (being so short, it’s quite dense, and most of these are near the end!). But it is modernized in just the right way, to feel plausible for this century.

This book is also, in its own strange way, a love letter to film as a medium. It’s what I’d imagine could be the plot if Martin Scorsese directed a horror movie and was in a nasty mood about the modern economy. The two main characters both love their art, and their nemesis at least claims to (but perhaps loves his own ability to sneer at those with ‘lesser’ tastes more). These two are artists, aesthetes, aspiring bon-vivants who had the misfortune of not living in interwar Paris, two who want glory and fulfillment but are run through the wash by capitalism. By the end, you realize, this story could have only ended one way, and what a fitting ending it is.

8:59:29 is short, sweet, and to the point, and never overstays its welcome. It is a triumph of brevity, a paean to film, and a lament of the fate of Appalachia. I recommend that horror junkies and movie buffs read it post-haste.

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Highlights: Grotty depiction of late-stage capitalism, also demons

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Microreview [book]: Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo

Hell Bent returns to Yale for more demons but less social commentary.

Note: This review contains spoilers for Ninth House.

As the dark academia subgenre continues to grow, Leigh Bardugo returns to Yale in her sequel to Ninth House (which I reviewed here). In Hell Bent, Alex must rescue her friend and mentor Darlington even though the higher-ups in the magical underworld of Yale have forbidden her. Full of Yale mystery, Hell Bent follows the characters fans of Ninth House came to love, but the social critique falls off in this adventurous sequel.  

While Ninth House ended in a huge cliffhanger—Darlington being swallowed into hell—the sequel jumps right in with Alex on the warpath to save Darlington whether the people of Lethe want her to or not. While most consider him dead or a lost cause, Alex and Dawes, the PhD student and Oculus for House Lethe, are certain the right spell or ritual will bring Darlington back to them. With Dawes’ research skills, they discover a ritual to try, but something goes wrong. They aren’t sure exactly what they released from hell—or if Darlington could remain there for so long unchanged.

Meanwhile, Alex still has to manage being a daughter, friend, and powerful enforcer for a gangster in California. Thanks to her training with Darlington and her time at Lethe, she has much better control of the ghosts she can see—and now hear. But ghosts are not the only monsters lurking around Yale, and Alex has to appease predatory alumni come back to check on Lethe. 

While Ninth House had an exacting structure, Hell Bent more loosely plays with time when convenient for the narrative. Told from Alex’s point-of-view (rather than alternating as in the first book), we see how competent she’s become at her job as Virgil, reluctantly replacing Darlington. Alex revels in her power and knowledge, and its cathartic to see her use all the tools of Lethe and her power to bring back a person she cares about. While the previous book focused on her relationship with Darlington, in Hell Bent, she must build a team to help her descend into hell, including Turner, her connection on the New Haven police department. In their attempt to rescue Darlington, Alex and her team must face their personal demons, fleshing out these secondary characters who took a backseat in book one to the tension between Alex and Darlington.

One thing I appreciated in Ninth House is largely absent in Hell Bent and speaks to the larger tension in the dark academia subgenre: actually critiquing the systems of higher education. In Ninth House, Alex’s struggle as a student coming from poverty, moving across the country, dealing with the ivy league classism played a part in the story. Another plotline dealt with sexual assault on campuses. In Hell Bent, such commentary takes a back seat to the adventure. What gestures Bardugo does include, such as mentioning the racial history of New Haven and Yale, fall flat as they tokenize the only major Black character in the book, Turner. 

With the publication of R. F. Kuang’s excellent Babel, the subgenre of dark academia is at a crossroads of what the dark should mean. Is dark academia merely an aesthetic, set dressing for any story, with rich autumnal colors, ivied brick, and monsters lurking in the library? Or, does the “dark” reference the need to recognize the horrors inherent in higher education, from white supremacy and colonialism to classism and rape culture? Currently, the majority of books lean on aesthetic while less see critique as foundational, with Babel being the premiere example. Ninth House contributed to both sides, aesthetic and some cultural commentary, but Hell Bent lands squarely on aesthetic. 

While I wish Bardugo had returned to the critique woven into the first book, her use of Yale as a location is masterful. For those enamored with the campus after reading Ninth House, Bardugo continues to unearth new mysterious and magical locations within Yale’s campus, complete with bizarre architectural history. I worried she wouldn’t be able to center the campus so fully after unraveling the Yale mysteries in book one. While she doesn’t have to do as much worldbuilding to set the scene, she narrows her focus as Alex and Dawes search campus for clues about how to save Darlington. 

While the critique was lost, Bardugo did pump up the action. Due to the detailed worldbulding around Yale and New Haven combined with the strict alternating structure of both time and point-of-view, it was easy to feel lost in Ninth House. In Hell Bent, the action starts and doesn’t stop. This novel felt much more in line with The Six of Crows duology in terms of pacing and plotting. For fans of the dark academia aesthetic, this novel is a fast-paced romp throwing complication upon complication onto the initial plot: rescue Darlington. 

Fans of dark academia will be pleased with the aesthetic and setting of Hell Bent, though at the expense of the social critique. While Ninth House was at times a plodding meditation on character, the sequel turns up the tension and the pacing with a direct plot that becomes more complicated with each chapter. Alex remains a likeable character coming into not only her power as she is able to see, here, and call ghosts to her aid—but also her wrath. She is not afraid to be angry and use that anger against those that come for her found family. Overall, Hell Bent is an engaging and enjoyable sequel to the popular Ninth House, but I hope the next book returns to the social critiques present in book one.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10: well worth your time and attention

Reference: Bardugo, Leigh. Hell Bent [Flatiron Books, 2023]

Posted by: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and ecology. 

Review: Underland by Maxime J. Durand

A cosmic horror setting without cosmic horror characters is a brilliant combination

You may remember that in 2007, Brandon Sanderson wrote that magic in fantasy stories should have logical rules that make sense, and later, in 2012, N. K. Jemisin wrote that the whole point of fantasy stories is that magic exists beyond all logic and sense. With all due respect to the inimitable quadruple-Hugo-and-quadruple-Locus winner, on this specific topic of fantasy literature the esteemed Ms. Jemisin is totally wrong and Mr. Sanderson is totally right. Magic is more interesting (rather, it's only interesting) when it has rules. And one demonstration of the wonders that can result from a strictly systematic magic system is Maxime J. Durand's dark fantasy novel Underland.

Originally posted as a web serial, Underland follows the quest of multiclass summoner/necromancer Valdemar to find a new world for humankind. Centuries ago, an evil moon blocked out the sun, dooming the world to the terrors of the night. Suddenly overwhelmed by unimaginable monstrosities, civilization quickly collapsed, and humans migrated to underground caverns where they'd be safe from the cold and the ghosts that roam the dead surface. Once resettled, humans discovered the magical potential in their own blood, and used it to rebuild a semblance of the stability they had before. Today the human territories are under the absolute rule of Dark Lords, immensely powerful mages with debatably compatible agendas. But other creatures already lived in the Underland before humans arrived, and some aren't willing to be nice neighbors. To be fair, too often humans haven't shown the noblest behavior toward other sentient creatures. What looks like peace conceals numerous tensions that may snap at any time.

But the worries don't stop at the mundane. In their study of magic, some have unwisely contacted extraplanar powers that can't be trusted, much less controlled. Such spells have been declared illegal, but that hasn't stopped the proliferation of clandestine cults that seek an escape from life underground. One cult in particular involved an entire family, the Verneys, who were exterminated by an order of knights dedicated to keeping those mysterious entities from invading the living world. The only survivor from the Verney family was Valdemar, back then a child, who now secretly experiments with planar travel to find a more inhabitable place for humankind to move to. Suspected of trying to continue his criminal family's loathsome rituals, he's been put under arrest, but one of the Dark Lords has taken an interest in his abnormally strong magical skills and has offered him the tools to finish his research... at an unspecified price.

Web serials are usually friendly bedfellows with fanfiction, and Underland unapologetically bears the marks of its self-published origins. The novel is evidently shaped by Dungeons and Dragons: its setting brings to mind the classic Underdark expansions; it is populated by the usual suspects—dark elves, dark dwarves, troglodytes, golems, and liches; some of the extraplanar locations namedropped in the text resemble those used in the game; and the plot is punctuated by quests, side quests, and downtime training. The rest of the worldbuilding samples liberally from Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and the Lovecraftian corpus to depict a setting precariously enveloped by unsuspected powers that are just one wrong incantation away from crossing into material reality.

The prose in Underland is effective at setting a macabre tone. Consider this chapter opening:

He dreamed of rats that night. They crawled in a grotesque pit dug in black oily stone, squeaking and gnawing on the flesh of the innocent.

The author knew to keep the alluring aesthetic of cosmic horror without the worst ingredient of cosmic horror, which is its attitude. This is a world of gory witchcraft, unnatural transformations, painful rituals, obscene ruins, threatening dreams, widespread pestilence, boiling blood, imprisoned demons, moldy tunnels, abhorrent experiments, and costly secrets. And yet, the author is deliberate in his selection of focus characters. Even though the book's setting has all the recognizable signs of cosmic horror, its characters are very emphatically not cosmic horror characters. Even though nothing more than a thin veil separates visible reality from tenebrous chaos, the mages we meet in this novel don't adopt the attitude of helpless desperation that is so annoying in traditional cosmic horror. They don't believe that the hidden forces that control the universe are beyond human comprehension; they don't accept the eternal superiority of the ancient gods; they don't fear the mysterious; they don't tremble in awe at the unearthly. It's like walking through the tired grimness of Black Mirror and finding Ted Lasso living there. With a beautiful, admirable ethos of humanism, these characters approach the unknown and make it known. Instead of submitting to the supernatural, they study it, find its practical applications, deduce its laws. These mages may be gifted with fantastical powers, but their sharpest tool is human reason.

And here we arrive at the greatest pleasure of reading Underland: watching our protagonist use creatively the rules of magic to make up combinations of spells that are wholly surprising yet follow logically from the established facts. It's an irresistible type of nerdy catnip to inhabit the inner thoughts of a smart hero as he reasons his way out of impossible plights. Either with inventive solutions born from a desperate moment of improvisation, or with procedures coldly planned with meticulous care, Valdemar is an inspiring hero who understands the unlimited power of lifelong learning.

His impressive talents notwithstanding, Valdemar is far from a perfect person. The execution of his entire family has stunted his ability to form connections to other people, and in some scenes his unconventional moral intuitions come off as appallingly heartless. At the same time that he makes progress in the challenging techniques of advanced sorcery, he undergoes an equally strenous education in interpersonal contact. It has a moving effect to watch this formidable spellcaster, who is no stranger to commanding demons and transmuting his blood into an interdimensional portal, discover for the first time the simple joy of making true friends who support his dreams without judgment.

Although the text always highlights the moral questions where Valdemar's position has defects, it's worth noting that, as a whole, the society of Underland rests on some surprising assumptions that go against the grain of what fantasy literature has usually considered acceptable. In Underland, to seek immortality is not viewed as inherently evil. Multiple methods exist to cheat death, including soul receptacles, mechanical bodies, youth potions, and even undeath, which causes no scandal. It's actually taken for granted that everyone who can afford it will resort to one of these methods, and that it would be inexcusably foolish not to. This is another manifestation of the novel's underlying humanism: just as mystery is the enemy, and thus shall be overcome, death is the enemy, and shall likewise be overcome.

Underland is the first part of a duology that continues in Underland 2. The reader must be warned that this novel ends in a cliffhanger, but what a howling hell of a cliffhanger it is. Now, it may be argued against this choice of ending, and against the novel in its entirety, that the author relies too much on the fact that Lovecraft's œuvre has become public domain, and such an accusation wouldn't be without merit. The reader may also feel distracted by the repeated appearance of narrative conventions inherited from Dungeons and Dragons, which carry unwelcome baggage in the form of bioessentialism, territorial expansionism, and unquestioned monarchism.

Once these missteps are admitted, there remains plenty to enjoy in Underland. Its unusual treatment of the aesthetic of cosmic horror is a refreshing change of direction from the undue reverence that puny mortals are typically expected to profess for the darkness. Even in the deepest bowels of the earth, the undying flame of human reason lights the way.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Durand, Maxime J. Underland [Podium Publishing, 2022].