Book Review: Rainmaker, Rainmaker, by Kevin B. Hillstrom

A creepy, evocative Dust Bowl tale of con-men and folklore 

cover painting by William Holbrook Beard, 1885

Remember high school English class? Remember MAN VS. MAN, MAN VS. NATURE, MAN VS. GOD, etc? In my high school lit class, we did not use A03-style tags. These categories were mutually exclusive: if this then not that, certainly not both, let alone all of the above! But Rainmaker, Rainmaker, rises above such artificial categorization. It is all of these, and more. It's a skillfully written, deeply unsettling book that risks, I fear, being lost in the maelstrom of traditionally-published books that bear the advantage of professional marketing and word-of-mouth and established writer reputations. 

Unless I can change that here, today. Because this creepy story of folklore and con-men and Dust Bowl desperation does not deserve to be overlooked amidst the unnavigable volume of 21st century publishing.

MAN VS NATURE: Greenheart, 1936. A once prospering farming town on the great plains of USA is now crumbling under the destruction of the Dust Bowl. Storms bring blinding, choking, unbreathable dust that leaves behind dead bodies, drowned on dry land, their lungs choked with dirt. There is no water; crops will not grow; starving rabbits infest the land and eat everything that grows. 

MAN VS MAN: Into this slow, scrabbling decline, a stranger comes to town: Gideon Starling. He brings with him wealth, glamour, impossible tales of exotic travels. He has been everywhere, done everything. And he promises that he can make it rain in Greenheart. 

He hires our narrator, a teenager named Will Thorpe, pays him handsomely, and asks of him nothing more than his company. Oh, and also, everything he knows about everyone in town. Basic information, nothing huge: what do people say, what do they think, who do they like, who do they hate? Gideon makes friends; he sows hope. But not everyone is as dazzled by his worldly charisma, and fault lines develop.

MAN VS GOD: Who is Gideon Starling? What makes him so unnaturally compelling? Why does the reader find him disturbing -- well before Will starts having doubts -- and mistrust him so deeply that she finds herself putting the book down and avoiding picking it up again without proper mental preparation? Because I want to be very clear here: for all his charisma in the town of Greenheart, for all his sinister vibes, on the page Gideon Starling is no sexy shadow daddy. He's creepy as hell. The events of the first half or more of the book correspond to a straightforward enough bit of literary fiction about con men preying upon desperate people in an evocative setting; but the mood and tone make it clear that something much more disquieting is going on.

Properly exploring that last A03-style tag would bring me into the realm of spoilers, but playing properly coy would make it impossible for me to remark upon some of the most lasting and successful elements of the book. I'm not going to be shy about pointing out that the cover image, a 19th century painting by William Holbrook Beard of a fox-king receiving tribute from his woodland prey subjects, is less metaphorical than it first appears. I'm going to remind people of that awful realization that Julia experiences in The Magicians that a Trickster-fox is everyone's favourite bit of folklore until he actually works his mischief on you, at which point you realize that some types of mischief are not cute and quirky, but absolutely fucking awful. And I'm going to remark what a brilliant concept it is to have creatures from folklore falling into their own portal fantasy, ending up trapped in a world where their magic doesn't work and they must scrabble to survive. 

Just as the farmers were betrayed by nature, finding themselves trapped in someplace weird and terrifying, where everything they thought was true and reliable -- the rain, the wind -- no longer works as it should, so too are these creatures trapped in the wrong world, unable to return to the home they knew. Just as those displaced Dust Bowl farmers become itinerant wanderers, seeking to find a new place, to make a new life, so too must these creatures find-- or make -- or ruthlessly carve -- a new niche for themselves. Some are more successful than others; some make allies, some exploit enemies. Some betray the innocent. The best stories have layers, and the layers that make up this tale -- the unearthliness of the Dust Bowl, which drowns its victims without water; the unexpected cruel humanity of these trapped, homesick creatures of myth and legend -- make a compelling narrative.

Hillstrom is not the only writer to have recently observed the otherworldly potential of the Dust Bowl as a setting. Last year's excellent The Antidote, by Karen Russell, told a very different type of story that built on many of the same components as Rainmaker Rainmaker: the brutality of the jackrabbit drives, the terrible dust storms, the role of Works Progress Administration photographers as key sources of documentary evidence. They're wonderfully evocative narrative tools, and the fact that two such different books have come out so close to each other makes me wonder -- why only two? Why do writers not use this setting more often? It's fantastic!

There are a few issues this book that could have been tightened up. Some revelations rely on a rather tired trope of meeting someone who just happens to have some very esoteric knowledge conveniently stored in his home library. Others rely on essentially tying the hero to a chair and monologuing at him. But where some tropes are deployed in conventional ways, other issues of pacing are nonstandard, but thereby effective and novel. A leisurely epilogue might feel like an oddly slow fade-out, but it has the effect of properly acknowledging that people's lives can extend beyond the main events of a book. Learning how these characters grow and move apart and experience joys and successes and griefs and utterly mundane disappointments does a lot to make them more real than when they were merely actors in a fantastical story.

Give this book a read, friends! There is gold to be found in the roiling tumult of self-published, indie-published, small-press-published books that struggle for visibility in the shadows of the big names. It is my privilege to dive therein and come out with treasures to share with you. This is one such treasure. Please come and have a gander at it.

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The Math

Nerd coefficient: 8: Well worth your time and attention

Highlights:

• Evocative Dust Bowl setting
• Folklore
• Con men

References: 

Hillstrom, Kevin B., Rainmaker, Rainmaker [2026].

Russel, Karen., The Antidote. [Knopf 2025].

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 or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.

Film Review: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched

A sprawling, exhaustive (and exhausting?) documentary about folk horror films

 

This three-plus hour documentary was not what I was expecting. I went into the 2021 documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror expecting something along the lines of a modern-day Haxan, the Danish/Swedish silent 1922 documentary/dramatization discussing the roots of local legends surrounding witches and witchcraft, dating back to the Middle Ages.

Instead, what I got was a survey of some nearly 200 films from (one of my favorites) Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973) all the way through contemporary films like Ari Aster's Midsommar (2019). How they managed to license clips from so many films, from so many countries, to visually tell the story of folk horror films in this documentary is a wonder. I say in all seriousness, hats off to the distributor's legal team. Without the absolute waterfall of clips included in this documentary, the proceedings would be extremely dry and I don't think the film would offer the viewer anything approaching the same level of engagement.  

Written and directed by Kier-La Janisse, the film begins with the "Big Three" of folk horror, Witchfinder General, Satan's Claw, and The Wicker Man. The film touches on the actual events that inspired the first two films -- a depraved religious zealot who exploited the societal breakdown of a civil war in England to amass power to himself and torture people he deemed "witches," and a true-crime case of a child who committed murder and was rumored to be involved in demonic cult, respectively. The popular conception of folk horror films begins with these, and in the minds of most casual viewers familiar with the subgenre, hews mostly to stories set in the British Isles, and usually involving some type of ancient pagan practice persisting unnoticed into the modern day.

But over the next three hours, Wilderness Dark and Days Bewitched then widens the lens beyond the British Isles, and I think this is the real mission of the documentary. It explores films either produced in or set in England, the United States broadly -- its previous colonial incarnation and various Native cultures, New England, and the American South -- Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Japan, the Philippines, and within Nazi Germany's occult fascination (while gesturing at by not including the Indiana Jones films explicitly). 

The central conversation of folk horror is one between the present and the past. One aspect is that change itself is frightening, both because of the unknown looming on the horizon, but also because of what has been forgotten from the past. There may be traps set, there may be poisons latent in the land itself, in the primordial soup from which modern culture evolved that lie in wait or, worse yet, bear us ill will. The horror comes from our inability to resist these things because we are ignorant of their possibility. This tension exists in every culture, it seems, and so the film makes a compelling argument that folk horror is a global phenomenon.

The film does stumble, however. In some ways, it falls beneath its own weight. Even at 3+ hours, it feels like it merely scratches the surface, and films are mentioned in a clause of a sentence and then gone before much can be done to link them to a larger thought. The documentary may have benefited from a closer look at fewer films in order to tell a more focused story. That lack of focus manifests in another quirk of the film, as well -- the writer/director is one of the interviewees featured throughout, and she is not identified onscreen as the filmmaker. I found myself wondering at the creative choices that led to the author being presented as one of many, rather than a guiding presence. I think the film may have benefited from a stronger authorial voice, rather than the presentation it ultimately went with. 

The breadth of films included also, I think, weakens the central argument of the movie. Here is a sampling of just some of the movies I've seen personally that were excerpted in this documentary: Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, Burn Witch Burn, Night of the Demon, Dunwich Horror, Lair of the White Worm, Suspiria, The Witch, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Messiah of Evil, The Lottery, Deliverance, The Shining, Poltergeist, I Walked with a Zombie, Serpent and the Rainbow, Ganja & Hess, Candyman, Hour of the Wolf, Midsommar, Black Sabbath. At a certain point, it starts to feel like if everything is folk horror, nothing is folk horror.

The overall impression is of a film that is both too much and not enough, one that introduces compelling ideas but leaves them largely unexplored. Here is a nice YouTube examination of some of the specific areas in which it does that. That said, the steady stream of titles and concepts does propel the documentary, and I found myself not regretting, or even really noticing, the long running time, which I spread out over two evenings.

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The Math

Highlights: If you like folk horror, or the even-more-specific category of daylight horror, this doc is a revelation of film recommendations; a specific focus on widening the lens to be more inclusive and thoughtful about traditions that are often excluded in film discussions

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Posted by Vance K—resident cult film reviewer and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together

Book Review: Gorse by Sam K. Horton

A deeply atmospheric tale set amidst the Cornish moors of the 18th century

Some books are heavy on plot, some on worldbuilding, some on character, some on vibe. Gorse, the debut novel of Cornish author Sam K. Horton, leads instead with atmosphere, and a sense of place so sharp it cuts.

Set in a small village in the moors in the late 18th century, this is a story that could be nowhere else but Cornwall. Every part of it, every word, every plant, every folkloric motif draws from its location, whether real or invented. It is a story full of flowers, trees and bogs, of smells on the air and weather, of sensation. Even after only a few pages it is a story that has deeply, thoroughly immersed you in its location, because that's where its magic is, and comes from... both in a metaphorical sense and a rather more literal one.

We follow Pel, the Keeper of the High Moor, a man charged with maintaining balance between the human world and the unseen world of the fey, along with his partially estranged ward Nancy. They both can see the spirits, sprites and fairies that infest the countryside, giving help and harm to the people around them, while remaining invisible to nearly all. They mediate, give charms and spells to those in need, bind things that threaten, and work to keep the world ticking over and in good order. But there are murders happening, sinister deaths that leave a burnt handprint on the victims' neck, and the vicar is starting to cast blame at those who he claims believe in devils. Tensions are high, and more and more people turn from the old traditions towards the church. The balance is no longer being maintained, and Pel's pride, his wounded ego, are holding him back from offering the help the village sorely needs. We watch as events unfold, as a promise of doom begins to build like storm clouds over this community, and the events that ensue.

Much like the sense of place, a lingering feeling of doom building up suffuses every page. It becomes very quickly apparent that Gorse is not a cheery novel, and that it takes its mode of fantasy from the old sort of folkloric tales, replete with death and vengeance, and bloody prices and sacrifices required for what is owed. This is not a story that glamorises magic, or the people who practice it, nor is it one where its magic can be systemised and categorised—there is nothing of D&D in this fantasy, only the raw stuff of old legends, where the logic of intuitive sense holds sway. It is a story about grim survival in the face of horrifying things, of forces beyond control except by those willing to pay the price. But it is also, very deeply, a story about people, and about a war between two ways of seeing the world, one that will allow peaceful co-existence, and another that demands no path but its own.

And that it does immensely well—the mythic quality of it all shines through on every page, and maintains a remarkably clear atmosphere throughout. But there is a catch to it. With that palpable doom, with the elevated tone of the mythic, comes distance. Horton's prose keeps its characters at arm's length, even when we are deeply invested in their point of view, in their feelings about a situation. We watch someone go through awful grief, and yet that grief fails to touch us, because the story always keeps us outside of the situation: an observer, not a passenger. It's a double-edged sword. Without this feeling of distance, without the dispassionate narrative voice, the story simply would not have the folkloric vibes it so painstakingly maintains. But that choice comes at a cost, and it is felt most painfully in moments of intense character emotion. It seems, in this story at least, you cannot have both.

And it is a shame, because both Nancy and Pel, as close as we get to them, are incredibly compelling characters to watch. They both have their burdens, their angers and their passions, and we see both of them go through some really quite emotive situations. But where another writer—a Guy Gavriel Kay, for instance—could twist this into sorrow that genuinely provokes tears, Horton never quite manages to stick the knife in, emotionally speaking, and it feels like a story that would merit it and feel the better for it. Sometimes, you—or at least I—like a good sweet sorrow type of story, where the sadness is so exquisitely crafted it is transformed into something wonderful and nearly addictive. There are moments here where I desperately wanted that. I saw a character reach that point, but because I felt kept outside of their mind, outside of their experience, I could never quite connect enough to them and what they were going through, what they were feeling, for the sorrow to hit just right. For Nancy, this means seeing someone—someone whose determination and goodness make her very easy to like—go through tragedy, heartbreak and rage, and not feel quite connected to it. Sad, frustrating, but still an arc whose narrative beats make sense to us, show us what sort of story it is. For Pel the struggle is greater, because he is such an interesting and difficult character. We spend much of the story watching his ego, his need for control, and his superiority get in the way of him making the right decisions, or indeed meaning he feels that he's the only one who can make those decisions, even when they impact the people around him. He's frankly insufferable at times, and it is very easy to sympathise with Nancy's irritation and fights with him. But we get glimmers, especially in moments of interaction with her, that there's a lot more going on under the surface with him. And because we are denied access to the fullness of his interiority, we are likewise denied an emotional connection to what drives him to be as he is, which makes the character so much less. I wanted, at so many points, to like him. We can see he is trying to do good, to help the world, to do his duty. But he gets himself in the way of his solutions so often that it would be rewarding to have access to the emotional narrative that drives all of that. As I say, we get glimmers. There are little moments that do give us pieces of it. It's enough that you know it's there. But just not quite enough to sink your teeth into.

There is, too, an issue with the tone of the book. The sense of incoming doom mentioned above is constant, from very early on, and it is increasingly easy to become numb to it. There's no narrative respite, so our capacity to appreciate the doom lessens as we grow accustomed. Had there been brief interludes—and they would only need to be brief—I think I would have appreciated that cold sense of impending disaster all the more, because it would keep biting me afresh.

But... both of these, problems though they might be, are also fitting. That doom, that detached tone, all feed into a coldness in the novel that is so absolutely fitting to both the story it is trying to tell and the place it is trying to evoke. Everything here comes back to place. You cannot escape it. To read it is to feel the chill of the wind and the rain, and I was intensely glad this was an autumn release, one I read just as the temperature here in the UK is taking a dip into chill, and I could hold a cup of tea close for comfort while reading. The brittle wintriness of the landscape of the Cornish moor escapes off the page and into the reader with ease.

And so too the folklore. Some of the aspects of the story were familiar to me—the giants Gog and Magog loom large (wahey) over English tales beyond just Cornwall, but some were either entirely new or close but not exactly the thing that I knew from my own upbringing elsewhere in England. At one point, Nancy sings:

See-saw, Margery Daw,

And here, I think, I know this one. But then she follows it with:

Sold her bed and lay on the straw.
Sold her bed and lay upon hay.
And Pisky came and carried her away.

Whereas the rhyme in my memory has her receiving only a penny a day for the slow speed of her work. But this is the traditional Cornish version, apparently. It is not English folklore, because folklore like this cannot be genericised in that way. It is tied to a place, and a place as experienced by one person, or one community, and it is the greatest strength of the story—this understanding that the magical and the mythic can be so intimately bound up in the living world, and thus to the particularities of a place.

We see occasional intrusions of myth from outside—though there are no coasts or mines on the moor here, buccas and spriggans visit—but those externalities are consciously rebuffed in favour of the people and magics of this place. Which is not to say it's a story where only those of a particular location are able to enact its magic, which is a less pleasant direction these types of stories can sometimes go in. Pel, we are told, journeyed here from elsewhere and became the Keeper because it was the way he could prove himself the best at what he did. People, it seems, do not need to be tied to their locations, just the magic—it is enough to know it, to make yourself familiar with it, in order to be able to wield it. I have more time for this as a thesis on folkloric magic. He brought some of where he came from with him, but blended it with the place he came, and so, even in a story that is so utterly rooted in a singular location, there is an understanding that these types of stories, these mythologies, have always been as transitory as the people who tell them.

Ultimately, I found it a successful book. I was willing to be carried away, to see with clear eyes a moor covered in gorse and heather, dotted with tors and the dangers of bog and marsh. I wanted to feel its wind and rain, and be a little afraid of its dangers along with the characters. And it achieves that atmosphere absolutely perfectly. Where it suffers is in the closer, more human work, and I am, ultimately, willing to forgive it that (even though it's often the thing I care most about in stories) because its delivery of atmosphere, of this bottling of a place and time, is so exquisite and unusual in its intensity. I don't think I've read anything quite like it in a number of years. It brings to mind perhaps, most clearly, Sarah Perry's work—the creeping winter chill of Melmoth or the open bleakness of The Essex Serpent. The landscape is different, but some of the intent is the same. And all three are books best savoured in the cold weather, with something warm to comfort you from them.

Highlights: atmosphere in heaps and spades, sadness and doom, intimate folklore and feeling of a specific place and time

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Horton, Sam K. Gorse [Solaris, 2024].

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

African Folktales Reimagined

A fantastical change of pace with insights into African folktales.  

Tucked away in Netflix’s expansive science fiction and fantasy collection is a 2023 anthology of stories from across Africa. African Folktales Reimagined is a joint project of UNESCO and Netflix. The six films are retellings of folktales from Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, Mauritania, Tanzania, and South Africa. The stories are not only interesting on their own, but they provide inspiration to explore the traditional stories on which they are based. 

 Katera of the Punishment Island is a film from Uganda, by director Loukman Ali. It is inspired by stories of an old practice of sending pregnant girls to a small island as punishment for getting pregnant before marriage. The punishment island is based on a true story of an island in Lake Bunyoi, Uganda where unmarried pregnant girls were sent. The expectation was that they would die but some girls were rescued by men seeking wives. In the film, Katera is trapped and chained on the island but is rescued by a man from a nearby village. Once free, she hatches a plan to take revenge on the person who put her there. 

Halima’s Choice is from Nigerian director Korede Azeez. The story is inspired by the folktale of the “Disobedient Daughter Who Married a Skull.” In the original folktale, the daughter refuses all of her suitors but is charmed by a stranger who arrives in the village. The stranger is actually a skull who has borrowed body parts from others in the spirit world to make itself appear as a handsome human man. The Netflix film does a twist on the story, setting the tale in a futuristic world where a majority of the world’s population lives in a Matrix-like artificial reality.  Halima’s community is one of the few places where humans live “real” lives. However, life in the real world is not perfect, in fact, it’s harsh and simple. Halima is an independent young woman whose family has arranged a marriage to a man she doesn’t want. When a handsome young traveler arrives in their isolated village, the community suspects he may be one of the AI entities who infiltrate villages to lure people into the artificial world. But Halima is bored with her rural existence and feels a connection to him. The story is particularly timely given the current debate over the role of AI in our society.

Anyango and the Ogre – From Kenya, directed by Voline Ogutu, Anyango and the Ogre is inspired by a traditional tale of an ogre who pretends to be kind to trick people into trusting him so he can devour them. In the Netflix film, society is divided. The Blue Zone has comfortable homes and modern conveniences while the rest of humanity lives in harsh, rustic conditions. A widow with three children, agrees to marry a wealthy man so that she can bring her family to the Blue Zone. However, her new husband is not what she expected and their comfortable life comes a high cost. The story deals with domestic violence and child abuse, so be warned. My favorite thing about this story is the way it overlaps the ogre folktale onscreen as a parallel to the real life suffering of the widow and her children. The crossover storytelling is a great technique to tell a difficult story.

Enmity Djinn – From Mauritania, by director Mohamed Echkouna, a mysterious Djinn (Jinni) appears in the town where a grandmother lives with her extended family.  The Djinn’s invisible presence escalates enmity in the community and in the grandmother’s family specifically. The story uses simple, dark costuming to convey the Djinn’s presence in a way that is sinister and eerie. Through flashbacks we see the grandmother encountering the Djinn as a baby as the sole survivor of a slaughter. The scenes of her family’s current beautiful home are contrasted with the presence of the Djinn. In a particularly clever scene, the grandmother talks to her young granddaughter about colors and each color evokes symbolic elements as she considers how to confront the Djinn that only she can sense. 

Katope – Katope is a story from Tanzania, by director Walt Mzengi. This is my favorite tale in the collection. Katope is based on the folk tale of the mud child. In the folk tale a couple wishes for a child and makes one out of mud. Because the child is made of mud he cannot ever be caught in the rain or he will be destroyed. In the Netflix film, Katope is a girl who comes to life when an old woman who wishes desperately to have a child forms one from mud. However, since Katope’s birth, there has been a terrible drought. When a rain bird appears, Katope makes a choice for her community. The story is simple and the visual effects are subtle. It’s a sweet poignant tale.

MaMlambo – From South Africa, by director Gcobisa Yako, MaMlambo is inspired by the water goddess from Zulu folklore. Instead of portraying Mamlambo as a malevolent being, the film reimagines Mamlambo as a protector of women who have been victims violence. The film emphasizes female empowerment in response to gender based violence and uses water as a symbol of rebirth. 

With so many excellent choices out there, this anthology might slip by you. The presentations are minimalistic and lack elaborate visual effects. Many of the stories involve violence against women. Most of the stories are bleak rather than uplifting. But if you are in the mood for something completely different, this collection might be just the thing to capture your imagination.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights

• Clever storytelling

• Minimal special effects

• A change of pace

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

The Novella Files: Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

Subject: Cassandra Khaw. Nothing But Blackened Teeth [Nightfire, 2021]

Accolades: N/A

Genre: Horror

Executive Summary:  A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company.

It’s the perfect wedding venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends.

But a night of food, drinks, and games quickly spirals into a nightmare. For lurking in the shadows is the ghost bride with a black smile and a hungry heart.

And she gets lonely down there in the dirt. (From Goodreads)

Assessment: Ennui is characterized by listlessness yet is never made more animated and compelling than in Nothing But Blackened Teeth. Sometimes ennui can be seemingly mundane--a lack of satisfying direction in your life. Other times, it can be a bride buried alive under her wedding venue, waiting for her runaway groom to arrive. While huge contrasts in severity, those who've experienced the former know that it can still be quite horrifying, and this novella is able to drudge up human nature and make it just as unnerving as the spiritual evil it unearths. That's not the only contrast between realism and fantasy. Nothing But Blackened Teeth has an array of realistically flawed characters, infused with Japanese folklore and sweeping, metaphorical language to elevate its tone into something uniquely satisfying.

Cassandra Khaw knows how to make every object seem interesting with inventive descriptions, but their dialogue is just as cutting. Whether its protagonist Cat's half-remove from the horrific proceedings in which things are still bubbling within her but she tries to stifle, or her friend Faiz' jovial attitude that begins to unmask, the characterization is always compelling and authentic. One thing that should be mentioned is that Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a story that leans more heavily into characterization than horror - especially in its first half - but to me, it's that grounding in humanity that make the latter proceedings cut deeper.

Khaw's writing has always worked for me, but I think this is my favorite of their works. The prose is just as lyrical and original as their best, and it's married to themes and characters that develop a lot of growth and complexity. It moves at a steady pace and growing tension, rewarding its readers with something incredibly moving and illuminating. Nothing But Blackened Teeth will make its readers think they've been plummeted into the action with lasting effects that should temper their ennui for quite a while.

Score: 8/10

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, editor, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!”

Microreview [TV]: The Librarians

The best new show you probably didn't watch.

I have to tell you all something…I am IN LOVE with The Librarians. Like, warm and fuzzy I wish I could hug it kind of love.

The Librarians is TNT’s new series based off their made-for-TV movie franchise of the same name (minus the s) from the mid 2000’s. But you don’t need to be familiar with the movies to watch the show, which is good for me because I had no idea they existed in the first place. The movies starred the fabulous trio of Noah Wyle, Bob Newhart, and Jane Curtin, and all three are present to help launch the inaugural episode of the TV series. Wyle plays the eccentric genius Flynn Carsen, now head Librarian, charged with protecting a secret collection of famous and powerful artifacts housed at a magical Library (I know right, how AWESOME?!). The Library chooses its own staff, and sensing a need it selects a guardian for Flynn, counterterrorism specialist NATO officer Eve Baird (Rebecca Romijn!) (seriously, I wish you could see me bouncing in my chair as I write this). And just in time too, because the Library has come under attack by evil forces who want to use its magic for bad. Flynn and Baird set out to locate three other geniuses selected by the library, with the intention of saving their lives, and consequently assemble a rag-tag group of assistant Librarians. Under the guardianship of Baird, these assistant Librarians are charged with protecting the world while Flynn ventures off to save the Library itself.

I love this show for the following reasons:

Nostalgia. I spent my formative years in the 90’s. I grew up reading books like Goosebumps and watching TV shows like Ghost Writer and movies like Indiana Jones, A Kid in King Arthur’s Court, and The Goonies. TNT's The Librarians encompasses this spirit. Flynn fights with Excalibur, the Librarians get stuck in a labyrinth and have to fight the minotaur to get out, and the team even has to defeat an evil magic app created by Morgan le Fay. Needless to say, The Librarians reminds me of the stuff I used to live for. And yes the show is kind of cheesy but that’s okay because it embraces the cheese. One of my biggest peeves with genre TV (and all TV in general really) is that it’s barftastically cheesy but everyone pretends that it’s not.

Acting. Another issue with (genre) TV is that it is often rife with horrible acting. But the acting in The Librarians is really, really good. Not only does it have established actors like Noah Wyle, Rebecca Romijn, and John Larroquette (Night Court whaaaaaat), but Lindy Booth, John Kim, and Christian Kane (a.k.a. the assistant Librarians) are all phenomenal too.

Female Characters. We don't need to get into the generally appalling portrayal of women on TV and in other media, but I will tell you that the female characters in The Librarians are awesome. Eve Baird especially, and I think it’s a combination of how she’s written and how she’s played by Romijn. Baird is a strong woman, both physically and emotionally, who’s not [gasp] bitchy or manly. She’s not a woman trying to fill a man’s shoes or a bippity boop sporting a pink gun. Instead, she’s a person, and she’s badass, and if you mess with her or her protectees you’ll regret it. She is stern and gives direction but listens to what other people have to say and isn’t afraid to admit when she’s wrong. She's a great character, regardless of sex.

The Truth. The real reason I love this show so much is that, as nerds, we all know what it’s like to be outsiders. But the thing is, sometimes I don’t even fit in with the nerds because I’m not a really a gamer nerd, or a science nerd, or a comic book nerd….I’m a The Librarians kind of nerd. And I’m so happy this show exists, and I really hope there are enough nerds like me out there watching it so that it gets signed on for another season.

The Librarians season has just ended (although I expect it will be syndicated on TNT), but here are some ways you can watch the series from the beginning:

Available on iTunes and Amazon for purchase,
and free from your cable (or whatever) provider via TNT's website.

The Math:

Objective Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for Eve Baird, +1 for helping bring back folklore and history as action fantasy, +1 for impressive cast/acting

Penalties: -1 for the unnecessary, albeit almost non-existent, romance sideline, -1 for Ezekiel's annoyingness at times, even though it's probably intentional

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 "Well worth your time and attention" 

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POSTED BY:  Tia,  putting the cool back in school and rocking socks here at Nerds of a Feather since 2014